Category: Mature Reading

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Luisa: Now and Then


By Carole Maurel, adapted by Mariko Tamaki & translated by Nanette McGuiness (Humanoids/Life Drawn)
ISBN: 978-1-59465-643-9 (TPB/Digital edition)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Beguiling Fantasy Unwrapped… 9/10

The concept of time travel is infinitely appetising and irresistibly seductive. The literary conceit offers limitless potential for stories ranging from colossal cosmic Armageddons to last-chance salvation gambits; all of history and the imagination as playground and stage; the use of past and future as a Petrie dish for social satire and cultural exploration, and even fantastical magical quests course-correcting lives and providing deeply personal, painfully intimate second chances for the confused, bewildered or simply lovelorn.

Luisa, Ici et là is one of the latter: a compelling and beguiling small story and little miracle by Carole Maurel that first appeared in 2016 and finds us English-speakers courtesy of Humanoid’s Life Drawn imprint.

It’s a sweet and oft-told tale given a stylish and welcoming contemporary gloss thanks to its wonderfully engaging lead character(s) who transforms a regulation coming-of-age parable into a heart-warming plea for understanding and – where necessary – forgiveness.

It begins as 15-year old Luisa Arambol gets off a bus. Exhausted and frustrated by discord at home in Chartres, she’s fallen asleep, missed her stop and awoken in Paris. She’s not aware of it yet, but she’s also journeyed from 1995 to 2013…

Across town, 33-year old Luisa Arambol is bitching to friend and workmate Farid. He’s heard it all before: the job sucks, she’s getting old, she drinks too much and has accomplished nothing. Worst of all, yet another man didn’t work out…

After panicking whilst trying to buy a phonecard – even the money is different here and everyone has a phone in their pocket now! – young Luisa is rescued by concerned observer Sasha who tries to help out the increasingly distressed kid. The child wants to ring her mother but cannot get through and is spiralling…

Hearing her talk and seeing what she’s wearing and carrying, Sasha soon suspects something incredible has occurred. After all, what teenager doesn’t recognise a computer tablet?

A quiet chat stabilises the kid long enough for Sasha to learn that Luisa has an aunt living in the same building she’s just moved into. It turns out Aurelia Arambol’s fifth floor flat is directly opposite Sasha’s new home, but it’s no longer occupied by the odd, ostracised single lady nobody back home will ever talk about. Little Luisa gets a big shock when that door opens and she meets her world-weary, dream-crushed, spinster older self.

Moreover, both versions instantly and instinctively realise who the other is…

Once upon a time an ambitious schoolgirl had dreams of being an art photographer but life has whittled that dream down to something far more mundane. Full grown her was left the flat by Aurelia – for reasons she still can’t fathom – and her spiky, frosty, naturally defensive state is inexplicably heightened by Sasha. Despite herself, older Luisa can’t stop staring at her new neighbour, even taking covert pictures of her, and is deeply troubled by an erotic dream featuring her…

When the object of her fascination is abruptly called away, Luisa reluctantly takes charge of the underage runaway and the situation worsens. Shared stories of mutual pasts and futures take a wild turn as aspects of their so-different personalities begin to transfer. Now-Luisa rediscovers her endless, long-vanished joie-de vivre and party spirit – and even 20-20 vision – and seems to look younger every day, just as Then-Luisa becomes sullen, responsibility-burdened, grey-haired, morose and short-sighted. Moreover, when they touch, their bodies seem to merge and coalesce…

And so begins a clash of wills and resolution of long-unfinished business found to have started on the day teen Luisa cruelly spurned an innocently impulsive overture from “out” and persecuted classmate Lucy.

That event was exacerbated by increased bullying at school and brutally reinforced at home by her own mother’s rigorous rejection of such shocking deviant behaviour as utterly unnatural, sparking a decades-long crusade to find Luisa a man…

Confused and upset, little Luisa acted up, got on a bus and ended up now while her older self just lived a lie for years…

The merging and trading of characteristics lends urgency to affairs before a long-deferred and dreaded confrontation with the Luisas’ mother generates surprising revelations about Aurelia, exposes the unknown fate of Lucy and prompts a complete revision of those attitudes that have shaped and repressed the modern-day doppelganger…

Addressing her family’s ingrained bigotry and intolerance and at last acknowledging and accepting she doesn’t just like boys or have to settle for a man is merely the first step in Luisa’s reunification and readjustment, auguring massive changes for all and forever that will begin when her fresher self at last boards a bus for home…

Refreshingly honest, charmingly blunt and captivatingly funny whist maintaining a sensitive neutrality of opinion – or prejudice – over sexuality and choices, Luisa: Now and Then sparkles with wit and charm: a sophisticated yet simple saga of self-examination that will delight all who read it, embracing the fanciful whimsy of cinema classics like The Enchanted Cottage or the Peter Ustinov’s 1948 film Vice Versa.
Luisa, Ici et là © 2016 La Boîte à Bulles et Carole Maurel. All rights reserved.

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Almost Silent


By Jason, translated by Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-606-99315-6 (HB/Digital edition)

John Arne Saeterrøy, who works under the pen-name Jason, was born in Molde, Norway in 1965, and appeared on the international cartoonists’ scene at age 30 with his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) which won that year’s Sproing Award (Norway’s biggest comics prize).

He followed with the series Mjau Mjau (winning another Sproing in 2001) and in 2002 turned almost exclusively to producing graphic novels. Now an international star, he has won seven major awards from such disparate regions as France, Slovakia and the USA.

Here the fine folks at Fantagraphics collected four of his earliest graphic novels in a superb hardback companion to the 2009 classic [Low Moon] which provides more of Jason’s surreal and cinematic, darkly hilarious anthropomorphic ruminations on his favourite themes of relationships and loneliness, viewed as ever through a charmingly macabre cast of silent movie archetypes, cinematic monsters and sad sack chumps.

Told in pantomimic progressions rather than full stories – and often as classical chase scenes reminiscent of Britain’s The Benny Hill Show – the wonderment begins with breakthrough album ‘Meow, Baby’ wherein a mummy goes walkabout from his museum sarcophagus encountering bums and gamins, vampires, aliens, angels, devils, skeletons and cops – always so many cops – in hot pursuit…

This primarily monochrome collection is called Almost Silent because it mostly is. Moreover, what dialogue appears is never informative or instructive, merely window dressing. The artwork is displayed in formalised page layouts rendered in a minimalist evolution of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style: solid blacks, thick lines and settings of seductive simplicity unwinding like an unending, infinite zoetrope show. These early works are collections of gags and situations more experienced than read.

A second untitled tale follows the perceived social inadequacies of males hungry for love: a werewolf, caveman – complete with courting cudgel, a Martian, Frankenstein’s monster and even Elvis. All try and die in the modern dating whirl…

The next sequence introduces cannibal ghouls and a movie-buff Travis Bickle/Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe also starving for acceptance, and continues with the bleakly comedic ‘Return of the Mummy’ and a delightfully tongue in cheek pastiche of Tintin and Blake and Mortimer entitled ‘The Mummy’s Secret’, featuring the entire ghastly cast, before ending with a fascinating selection of 3-panel gag strips.

The next featured volume is ‘Tell Me Something’: a more ambitiously visual outing that acknowledges its antecedents and influences by using silent movie dialogue cards instead of word balloons. It follows a plucky heroine as she searches for affection in all the wrong places with her Harold Lloyd-like would-be beau. Also in attendance are the usual cast of filmic phenomenons…

‘You Can’t Get There from Here’ concentrates mainly on the 1930s movie Frankenstein cast: the monsters, their equally artificial wives, their lovelorn and covetous creators and even the Igors: misshapen, wizened assistants also all seeking that one special person – or thing. Here the art is supplanted by the startling and highly effective addition of bronze inks for a compelling duo-tone effect that sits oddly well with the beast’s bittersweet search for his stolen, bespoke bride.

We conclude with a rather riotous adventure romp. ‘The Living and the Dead’ details a perfect first date interrupted by the rising of the unquiet dead and end of civilisation in the rotting teeth of carnivorous zombies on their final march – possibly the funniest and most romantic yarn in the whole book.

Jason’s work always jumps directly into the reader’s brain and heart, using the beastly and unnatural to ask gentle questions about basic human needs in a wicked quest for answers. That you don’t ever notice the deep stuff because of the clever gags and safe, familiar “funny-animal” characters should indicate just how good a cartoonist he is.

His comic tales are strictly for adults but allow us all to look at the world through wide-open childish eyes. He is a taste instantly acquired and a creator any fan should move to the top of the “Must-Have” list, so consider this superb hardback your guaranteed entry into his fabulous fun world…
© 2009 Jason. All rights reserved.

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One Beautiful Spring Day


By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-555-8 (TPB/Digital edition) 978-1-68396-588-6 (slipcased HB)

There have always been uniquely gifted, driven comics creators who defy categorisation… or even description. My picks for that elite pantheon of artisans includes Kirby, Ditko, Segar, Hergé, Herriman, Will Eisner, Osamu Tezuka, Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Franquin, Frank Bellamy, Basil Wolverton, Mort Meskin, Kim Deitch, Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, Eric Bradbury, Frank Hampson, Tony Millionaire, Alex Niño, Neal Adams, Richard Corben, Wally Wood and a few others who all brought something utterly personal and universally influential to their work just beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly) to elucidate, encapsulate or convey.

They are all perfect in their own way and so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise or analysis can do them justice. You just have to read their stuff for yourself.

Arguably at the top of that distinguished heap of graphic glitterati sits Jim Woodring. It’s a position he has maintained for years and appears capable of holding for generations to come.

Woodring’s work has always been challenging, funny, spiritual, grotesque, philosophical, heartbreaking, beautiful and extremely scary. Moreover, even after reading and believing that sentence you will still be absolutely unprepared for what awaits the first time you encounter any of his books – and even more so if you’ve already seen everything he’s created.

Celebrated as a cartoonist, animator, fine artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance man, Woodring’s eccentric output has delighted far too small and select an audience since 1980 and his official mini-comics forays. Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Woodring suffered delusions and hallucinations as a child and regularly believed his parents wanted to kill him.

These traumas seemingly sensitized and attuned him to symbolism and pictorial expression as well as opening him to assorted philosophies and belief systems. The young lad managed his “apparitions” by drawing them as strips in the waking world where he had control of them. Overcoming problems with school, drugs and alcohol, Woodring was eventually diagnosed with autism and prosopagnosia, but by then he had a discovered the power of Art.

He turned his life around through his own determination and by the inspiration of comics masters like Kirby, Ernie Bushmiller, Gil Kane and Crumb, classical fantasists such as Pieter Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch and particularly Salvador Dali, and the animations of the Fleischer Brothers, Tex Avery and Walt Disney.

Woodring found surcease from a lifetime of punishing dreams by pictorializing nightmares and through following Buddhism, Taoism and the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. After working as a farm labourer, garbageman and TV cartoon animator – with occasional comics side jobs like colouring the Roy Thomas/Gil Kane adaptation of the Ring of the Nibelungs, illustrating 1997’s Smokey the Bear, Friend of the Forest, and scripting stints on Aliens and Star Wars – Woodring began fully sharing the messages from his subconscious. He had begun self-publishing his autobiographical, “autojournal” comics in 1980, and seven years later was picked up by Fantagraphics Comics and thereafter all of us…

Readers who avidly adored his groundbreaking, oneirically autobiographical magazine Jim and its notional spin-off series Frank (with graphic novel Weathercraft winning The Stranger 2010 Genius Award for Literature) were joined by fans of Tantalizing Stories, Seeing Things or more mainstream features like his Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse Comics but, always, there was the promise of greater surprises in his next story…

An accomplished storytelling technician these days, Woodring grows rather than constructs solidly surreal, abstractly authentic, wildly rational, primal cartoon universes, wherein his meticulous, clean-lined, sturdily ethereal, mannered blend of woodblock prints, R. Crumb landscapes, expressionist dreamscapes, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria all live and play …and far too often, eat each other.

His stories follow a logical, progressional proto-narrative – often a surging, non-stop chase from one insane invention to the next – layered with multiple levels of meaning yet totally devoid of speech or words, boldly assuming the intense involvement of the reader will complete the creative circuit.

This compelling collection is available digitally but works best as the spiffy vellum-cased archival paperback or limited edition boxed hardback: each iteration a superbly recomposed compilation combining earlier segments of his constantly unfolding and refolding saga, now justifiably treated as a treasured artefact… and ideal gift…

Gathered – or maybe corralled – here are the previously-published contents of Congress of the Animals, Fran and Poochytown, all deftly rearranged and supplemented by a hundred pages of new and previously unseen material.

Set in the general environs of Woodring’s wickedly warped other place – “The Unifactor” – here is a wild, weird and welcome return to a land of constant change and intense self-examination, where all motives are suspect and all rewards should be regarded as a trap. And here cheerfully upbeat Frank goes for another exceptionally eventful walk in the sunshine…

Laminating this vertiginous vehicle with an even crueller patina is lovelorn tragedy and loss as Fran adds to the ongoing tribulations of dog-faced Frank: her own perilous perambulations of innocence lost displays pride, arrogance, casual self-deceit, smug self-absorption and inflated ego as big as her former beau’s and leads to a shattering downfall just as punishing.

Put bluntly, Fran was Frank’s wonderful girlfriend and through mishap, misunderstanding, anger and intolerance he lost her. Now, no matter what he does or wheresoever he wanders with his faithful sidekicks at his side, poor Frank just can’t make things right and perfect and good again. Through madcap chases, introspective exploration and the inevitable direly dreadful meetings and menacings in innumerable alternate dimensions, True Love takes a kicking …and all without a single word of dialogue or description.

Here, the drawn image is always king, even if the queen has gone forever – or is it just a day?

Many Woodring regulars return, as both Krazy Kat-like ingénues work things out on the run through a myriad of strange uncanny places. There are absolute mountains of bizarre, devilish household appliances, writhy clawing things, toothy tentacle things and the unspeakable Thingy-things inhabiting the distressingly logical traumic universe.

Jim Woodring’s work is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – otherwise why would I need to plug his work so earnestly? – and, as ever, these drawings have the perilous propensity to repeat like cucumber and make one jump long after the book has been put away, but he is an undisputed master of graphic narrative and affirmed innovator, always making new art to challenge us and himself. His is a dreamscape of affable terror and he is can make us love it and leave us hungry for more.

Are you feeling peckish yet…?
© 2022 Jim Woodring. This edition © 2022 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

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Rogan Gosh: Star of the East


By Pete Milligan & Brendan McCarthy with Tom Frame (Vertigo/Little, Brown & Co)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-143-4 (Vertigo TPB) 1-85386-253-3 (Little, Brown PB)

It feels like a cop-out and total dereliction of duty, but none the less true that some graphic novels simply defy categorisation and defeat the reviewers’ dark arts: they just have to be read, experienced and judged on a personal basis. We could stop there and it’s over to you…

However, should you require more…

Rogan Gosh is a short serial by Pete (Skin; John Constantine, Hellblazer; Strange Days; The Human Target; Batman; Red Lanterns; Shade, the Changing Man; Enigma; The Extremist; X-Statix; Johnny Nemo, Bad Company) Milligan and Brendan (Dream Gang; Mad Max: Road Fury; Judge Dredd; Spider-Man: Fever; ReBoot; Zaucer of Zilk; Skin; Swimini Purpose; Strange Days; Sometime Stories) McCarthy with notable contributions from letterer/colourist Tom Frame.

It first appeared in short-lived, controversial, cutting edge, experimental British comic magazine Revolver – specifically issues #1-6 spanning July-December of the Fleetway Publication. It was later collected into a graphic album by DC/Vertigo in 1994. I’m pretty sure there was also a Fleetway collection, but if so, it’s nigh impossible to find now, and that was a lifetime ago, so I might be dreaming of another reality…

Like companion/precursor title Crisis, Revolver’s brief was to make comics for people who had outgrown funny picture stories and adults who claimed to have never read them. It was supposed to be political, fashionable, contemporary and contentious, and it succeeded over and over again, in strips like Dare, Purple Days, Happenstance and Kismet, God’s Little Acre, Pinhead Nation and Plug Into Jesus.

For many, the jewel in the crown was a bizarre and beautiful, sardonically surreal saga incorporating English curry houses, karmic renewal and exploration, science fiction iconography, cultural commentary and (in)appropriation, ferociously irreverent satirical comedy, and – apparently – concealed creator autobiography. It referenced Indian philosophy and religions, British colonial history and modern urban street life in an onrushing miasma of visual and ideological concepts that blew the mind and generated outrageous belly laughs. There were loads of guns and rockets and tons of sex too…

Like many Milligan & McCarthy creations the strip is often described as “post-modern psychedelia”, evolving from channelled childhood experiences of two white art school kids who had grown up amidst the burgeoning fallout of the Desi Diaspora. That’s when families from the countries of the Asian sub-continent – specifically Pakistan, Bangladesh and India – migrated to western countries like Britain, bringing new thought, music, fashions, scents and especially food to broaden and enrich an evolving multiculture. There were even comics unlike any we’d ever seen before when cruising the streets of Southall or Brick Lane…

Proud products of such an environment and rising superstars thanks to 2000AD, writer Milligan and co-plotter/illustrator McCarthy had planned to deliver a kind of “Bollywood Blade Runner”, but the story sort of got away from them… as is often the case with passion projects…

I’m feeling truly redundant trying to precis the plot, but for the sake of form, try this…

The universe exists on many levels and at all times. In Raj-era India Rudyard Kipling has shamed himself with a native houseboy and now roams the streets of Lahore, seeking a holy man to save his sanity and reputation by putting him in touch with the fabled Karmanauts.

His quest succeeds and the author is – via drugs and magic and ancient wisdom – elevated to a state where he witnesses a future where laddish London oaf Dean Cripps escapes stroppy girlfriend Mary Jane to go for a curry at the magnificent Star of the East in Stoke Newington.

When Dean feels a frisson of connection with beautiful waiter Raju Dhawan, the energy unleashes time-travelling wonder warrior Rogan Gosh just in time to defend enlightenment and all realities from the clandestine attacks of destructive Kali and her malign vampiric agent the Soma Swami…

It all gets a bit strange after that, what with audacious experimental love, devastation and recreation, Karma Kops, and that pest monkey god Hanuman, but rest assured that by the end, what you presume to be the regulation natural universe is back near where it belongs…

Although the story and events might bewilder, what is beyond question is the astounding art by Brendan McCarthy: utilising a blend of pen, paint and early digital technology to create a lush and vibrant homage to the startlingly bright colours of the subcontinent and plush décor of favourite London curry houses and tapping the wellsprings of a fevered and sublimely seasoned imagination to beguile the eyes. This stuff is just so damn pretty…

Hard to find in its original form, the entire trip is reprinted in 2013 anthology The Best of Milligan & McCarthy beside lots of other great stuff like Freakwave, Paradax! and Skin. The collection (which is on my to-do list…) is also available in digital format so there’s no need to wait.

Your destiny awaits, you only have to choose to embrace it…
™ & © 1990, 1994, 2013 Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy. All rights reserved.

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The Once and Future Queen volume 1: Opening Moves


By Adam P. Knave & D. J. Kirkbride, Nick Brokenshire, Frank Cvetkovic & various (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-50670-250-6 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-63008-793-7

Critics and creative writing lecturers would have you believe all of drama can be reduced to Seven Basic Plots, and all else is mere garnish. Having, in my far-too-long and not-quite-sedentary-enough life, been both (teacher and critic, not edible decoration), I can only say “I can neither deny nor confirm…”

What does happen – a lot! – is that vastly popular and memorable myths, stories and legends are continually reinterpreted and remodelled for new generations. Go reread or see Gilgamesh, Beowulf and Person of Interest or the biblical story of David, Cinderella, Jayne Eyre, Tiger! Tiger!/The Stars My Destination or Slumdog Millionaire… then go play some more on your own. We have pressing business here…

One of the most comforting and potent of these recurring themes is that of a great king or hero waiting to return and redeem us. We probably see it most often in riffs on King Arthur, which are everywhere. If you like such works as Alan Garner’s Brisingamen trilogy (The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Boneland). newspaper strip Buck Rogers, TV’s Adam Adamant and even Camelot 3000, you’ll probably also love this wry, witty and sublimely inclusive spin on the old standard.

Crafted by writers Adam P. Knave & D. J. Kirkbride and illustrated by Nick Brokenshire (the team behind the magical Amelia Cole adventures), The Once and Future Queen features a mixed race (multi-ethnic?), bisexual (or is it non-binary?) girl revealed as destiny’s child and rightful sovereign of England as well as foreordained saviour of the world. No pressure, then…

It begins in Portland Oregon, where youthful chess prodigy Rani Arturus is panicking over her imminent flight to Cornwall for an important tournament. For her dad William, it’s a trip to the “old country” and mum Durga is American by way of India, so it counts as her and her daughter’s roots, too. Rani has no idea how incredibly accurate and life-changing that assessment is…

The tournament is a disaster. All her planning and strategizing go out the window when Rani is distracted by – and fatally attracted to – a pretty blonde girl in the audience. It’s not just her clearly reciprocated attentions: the chess master is convinced she somehow knows her …

Rani doesn’t make it past the first round, and ashamed and furious at the waste of time, money, failure and her own previously unsuspected feelings, walks a scenic Cornish clifftop when a misstep sends her over the edge and into a hidden cave…

Meanwhile, on the clifftop she just disastrously vacated, the subject of Rani’s ruminations is absentmindedly tracing her footsteps. Gwen was irresistibly fascinated by the American contestant, but is used to having instant crushes on girls by now. What is new is how familiar this one seemed, so when she spots the object of her desires entering a cave with glowing light coming from it, she follows…

Rani is beguiled. The cave is an obvious tourist trap and contains a sword stuck in a stone anvil, but she finds herself compelled to tug on it anyhow. As Gwen watches, a flash of light transforms the American into an armoured vision and an old geezer in a space suit appears…

Merlin is time adrift and pretty confusing, but adamantly insists Rani is the long-awaited “Arthur foretold”: the Once and Future Queen (Ruler?) destined to unite the world.

It’s just in time too, as long-exiled magical monster race the Fae are running out of room and resources and are ready eager to return and conquer Earth…

Rani is not convinced. She knows all the stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and knows what a hero should be. However, according to the wizard, lots of things got lost in translation and that guy was simply a well-meaning fraud: a place holder dragged in to cope with a momentary crisis in lieu of the big event kicking off just about now…

Gwen has already impetuously left for Portland by the time Rani’s incredulous parents are brought up to speed and when the girls finally meet in a park, they head for a diner to get to know each other, only to discover their server Lance went to school with Rani and, like Gwen, is also part of the magic revival. In a corner booth sits world-renowned and beloved fantasy author Morgan Pari: also a key actor in the replaying saga, but before the celebrity-struck kids can get near her, a squad of War Fae materialise and savage battle for Earth is joined…

Merlin’s magic has made Excalibur and Rani’s armour instantly accessible and also imparts warrior skills to the Queen. Shockingly, the same is true for Gwen and Lance who at last realise they are physical echoes of past legendary beings too…

Having survived their trials by combat, the heroes reborn are whisked away by Merlin who tells them the true story of the human history and the war against the  malign King in Shadow to prepare them for the forthcoming greatest fight in human history…

Sadly, as they train and repeatedly skirmish with the Fae, what’s also inescapably repeating is the romantic triangle that destroyed the Camelot they all draw their preconceptions from…

Not all is written in stone. As the heroes move their already-targeted loved ones to a safe space, and strategize their next moves, a key component of the Fae army goes off-script, splitting the enemy’s forces and resolve, but also sparking a brutal, highly public clash that serves to put blinkered humanity on terrified high alert…

Now, with everything to play for, the endgame has become utterly new territory and all the reborn champions can do is ready themselves for anything…

To Be Continued…

Fast-paced, action-packed, bright, breezy and slyly funny, The Once and Future Queen: Opening Moves is a delight to read, with this opening chapter augmented by extras including a design sketchbook with commentary from all concerned; cover concept roughs; selections from the minicomic used to pitch the series to Dark Horse; colour palette roughs and an alternate ending. If you’re in the mood for something familiar that enticingly fresh and new, your quest ends and begins here…
The Once and Future Queen™ & © 2017 Adam P. Knave, D. J. Kirkbride & Nick Brokenshire. All rights reserved.

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Mesmo Delivery


By Rafael Grampá, with Marcus Penna, translated by Júlio Mairena (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-457-6 (HB) 978-1-59582-465-3 (TPB)

In an industry and art form that has become so very dependent on vast interlocking storylines, an encyclopaedic knowledge of a million other yarns and the tacit consent to sign up for another million episodes before reaching any kind of narrative payoff, the occasional short, sharp, intensely stand-alone tale is as welcome and vital as a cold beer in the noon-day desert.

Just such a salutary singleton was Mesmo Delivery, first solo English-language release of singularly gifted writer/artist Rafael Grampá, who originally devised the macabre and gritty thriller in his native Brazil back in 2008.

Picked up and translated by Dark Horse two years later, this stark and spookily effective grindhouse/trucker movie amalgam delivers dark chills, gritty black humour and eerie, compulsive mystery in equal, intoxicating amounts… and it all starts, unfolds and ends right here. No muss, no fuss, no busload of tie-ins.

Aging, raddled Elvis impersonator Sangrecco is an extremely odd deliveryman, working for a rather unique haulage business. For a start, he can’t actually drive, which is why hulking, gentle, cash-starved ex-boxer Rufo has been temporarily hired by the boss to operate the truck on a run through some very bleak bad country.

Rufo doesn’t ask questions. He just pilots that huge container rig with its mysterious and unspecified cargo – that he’s not allowed to see – to God knows where, listening to the obnoxious, pompous Sangrecco mouth off about his many, unappreciated talents.

Things take a bad turn when they break at the isolated Standart Truck Stop. The Elvis freak is too lazy to even fetch his own beer, and when Rufo takes care of business and grudgingly tries to pay, a sleazy pack of locals trick him into an impromptu street fight on a cash-bet.

The ploy is a set-up and when Rufo proves unexpectedly tough, the prize-fight gets too serious and results in a fatality – and possibly more…

Street-fighting boss tough Forceps then convinces his “townie” cronies and the other onlookers that they need to get rid of all the witnesses. And that’s when old Sangrecco reveals what his speciality is…

Stark, brutal, rollercoaster-paced and rendered with savage, exhilarating bravura, this thundering, down-and-dirty fable grips like a vice and hits like a juggernaut, providing the kind of excitement every jaded thriller fan dreams of.

Also included in this brief, slim, scary and mesmerising tome is an effusive Introduction from Brian Azzarello, pin-ups by Mike Allred, Eduardo Risso, Craig Thompson and Fábio Moon plus stunning 16-page sketch, design and commentary section ‘Making of Mesmo Delivery’.

Since Mesmo Delivery, Grampá has gone on to shine with his deliciously eccentric Furry Water as well as on such established titles like Hellblazer, American Vampire, Strange Tales and Uncanny X-Force amongst others, but this superbly visceral, raw storm of sheer visual dexterity and narrative guile is an ideal example of pared back, stripped down, pure comics creativity that no mature lover of the medium can afford to miss.
Mesmo Delivery ™ & © 2008, 2010, 2014 Rafael Grampá. All rights reserved.

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These Savage Shores


By Ram V, Sumit Kumar, Vittorio Astone, Aditya Bidikar & various (Vault Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-93942-440-2 (TPB/Digital edition)

Rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with in western comics, award-winning writer Ram V has been making waves since 2016. I will surprise absolutely no one by revealing that Ram Venkatesan’s career actually began in his birthland of India as early as 2012, and we in the west barely noticed…

While resident in Mumbai, he created acclaimed series Aghori before moving to Britain to take a Creative Writing MA at the City of London University. Since then he’s co-created series such as The Many Deaths of Laila Starr; Ruin of Thieves; Paradiso; Blue in Green; Black Mumba and Brigands. He’s also made serious inroads into the US superhero mainstream with stints on Marvel’s Venom and DC’s Justice League Dark; Catwoman, the reinvented Swamp Thing and Batman: Gotham Nocturne.

His stellar trajectory was enhanced by two projects for America’s Vault Comics: Radio Apocalypse and – spanning October 2018 to October 2019 – 5-issue miniseries These Savage Shores. Illustrated by Sumit Kumar, coloured by Vittorio Astone and lettered by Aditya Bidikar, this brooding, violent tale of timeless love and undying monsters is an historical drama tainted with horror overtones, combining gothic pastiche with the enticing mystique of colonial India, even if the events actually occur in the years before England officially conquered the “Sub-Continent” and became the British Empire…

Most enticingly and powerfully appealing, it takes the form of a bande dessinée-styled tale with broad cross genre appeal and is tailor-made for conversion to the large or small screen…

It begins in a paradisical garden where dancer Kori teasingly tests her lover Bishan, coquettishly enquiring what he is and how he was made…

The year is 1766 and, miles distant, a sailing ship of the East India Company carries a most unwelcome cargo. Disgraced scion of English Society’s most dangerous secret, Lord Alain Pierrefont has been exiled for breaking the cardinal rule of his class: being found out…

Eternal, patient and few in numbers, vampires have infested the aristocracy for centuries, leading discreet lives of bloody privilege while literally feeding off the poor. Those humans who reluctantly share the secret also know their place and keep quiet about the occasional atrocity. However, there are some mortals who ruthlessly hunt the clandestine overlords.

When one team almost ends the slumming predator, his peers and kin have no choice but to banish him for the shameful indiscretion of continuing to feed under the shocked gaze of crowds of no longer complacently ignorant human cattle…

With the discretion that sustains them as much as blood imperilled, vampire lords convene and Count Jurre Grano is compelled to despatch his favourite offspring to the ends of the Earth. In this case it’s also a promising new outpost of expansion: the squalid, unprepossessing port of Calicut on the Malabar Coast. The prodigal is left to the dubious care of his representative Colonel James Wilson Smith: a man of vision with dreams of controlling the immensely profitable wares previously carried by the fabled Spice Road of the East…

The merchant soldier’s plan is to divide and conquer for mercantile gain by grooming child-prince Vikram of the Zamorin, but impatient, spoiled Pierrefont will not be reasoned with. Calicut is just another playground to him and Kori his next meal. However, when the vampire traps her, his last thought is that he should have paid more attention to the Prince’s hulking masked bodyguard Bishan – a being also pretending to be merely mortal…

By October 2nd 1766, vampire hunter Zachariah Sturn has reached Calicut, determined to finish his business with Pierrefont. He believes the monster has found powerful and wealthy new allies to shield him and is unaware of the vampire’s actual fate. Reporting meagre progress in a letter to his clergyman brother, Sturn lays plans to topple these obstacles, assuming the boy Vikram has already been turned into a royal vampire…

Meanwhile in Mysore, young prince Tipu (Sultan Fatah Ali Sahab Tipu, known historically as Tipu Sultan, The Tiger of Mysore) meets his father Sultan Hyder Ali, Sahab to discuss the East India Company and their blatant plans for the always-warring rival kingdoms of India. The English are already destabilising the regions and are clearly going to use Vikram of the Zamorin as their wedge for further progress. The prophetic debate is derailed when recently-rejected Smith receives word that Pierrefont is dead – permanently dead – and realizes that there will be Hell to pay once the exile’s unholy family in England learn of it…

As the Sultan attempts to parlay with the Zamorim faction, their rebellious Prince Vikram has decreed a royal hunt to catch the “man-eater” that killed Pierrefont and Bishran bids farewell to Kori. The blatant cover-up does not deter Sturn, who stalks Vikram only to discover there are other, greater monsters serving those in the power in this land…

Pierrefont’s death gives the English justification to attack Mysore, but the international crisis has dangerously personal implications too. In England, Grano has learned of his kin’s death and reacts with typically ruthless disregard for human life. As the western invaders cut inland, Hyder Ali’s pleas for aid from Vikram fall on deaf ears, but his immortal guardian Bishram agrees to help fight the English. In March 1767 as a climactic battle looms, the eternal man-beast ponders how his endless ages of existence have been briefly brightened by love for the mortal Kori, before returning to the current war. Two months later, as Wilson’s soldiers remorselessly advance, Calicut greets another ship from Britain, carrying Grano and a contingent of vampires resolved to lay down their law and avenge a slain kinsman…

The fate of a nation is decided without them, as betrayal leads to British triumph. After waiting too long, Bishan unleashes the legendary beast inside him, but now only spiteful vengeance-taking is possible…

It is too little, too late. In November, the battle-ravaged land endures more horror as freshly-turned vampires roam by night: an undead army commanded by Grano who still obsessively hunts Pierrefont’s killer. The arrogant peer underestimates Vikram and his allies, however, almost losing everything in a brutal clash at the palace gates. His forces devasted, the vampire lord nevertheless succeeds, finally learning how his progeny died, and when Bishran returns a month later, he finds the malign bloodletter has returned to England, but left behind him a keepsake: one who will also abide forever…

The spectacular conclusion comes as Bishan voyages to London for definitive confrontation with Grano: one that will change many lives and determine the future of two kingdoms…

Superbly blending a sparkling and terrible time in history with classic horror themes, dark romance with canny political machinations and stunning action, These Savage Shores is a potent examination of power in all forms and its misuses, gloriously realised by illustrator Kumar (Batman; Justice League; Man-Bat) who also provides a large and lovely gallery of covers and variants here.

Beguiling, exotic wonderment for fear-loving older readers, this is a tale of the east no one should miss.
© 2019 Ram V & Sumit Kumar. All rights reserved.

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Lulu Anew


By Étienne Davodeau, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-972-4 (HB/Digital)

In 2010 Bande Dessinée artist, writer and designer Étienne Davodeau completed a 2-volume tale he’d started in 2008. He was already popular, award-winning and extremely well-regarded for his reality-based and reportage style comics work, but Lulu femme nue was something that was special even for him. Within a year the story had been made into a much lauded and celebrated film by Solveig Anspach.

Davodeau was born in 1965 and, whilst studying art at the University of Rennes, founded Psurde Studios with fellow comics creators Jean-Luc Simon and Marc “Joub” Le Grand. His first album – L’Homme qui aimait pas les arbres (The Man Who Did Not Like Trees) – was released in 1992.

He followed up with a string of thoughtful, passionate and beautifully rendered books like The Initiates, Les Amis de Saltiel, Un monde si tranquille, Anticyclone, Les Mauvaises Gens: une histoire de militants, Le Chien Qui Louches and Le Droit du sol : Journal d’un vertige. Consequently he is now regarded as an integral part of the modern graphic auteur movement in French and Belgian comics.

NBM translated and collected both volumes of the dreamily moody mystery into a stunning hardback edition and Lulu Anew is now regarded as one of the very best graphic novels of its genre…

It begins with a kind of Wake where a number of friends gather to learn the answers to a small, personal but immensely upsetting event which has blighted their lives of late. Xavier is the first to speak and relates what they all already know. Lulu, a frumpy 40-something with three kids and a very difficult husband, has been missing for weeks. She went off for yet another distressing job interview and never came back…

It wasn’t some ghastly crime or horrible abduction. Something simply happened when she was in the city and she called to say she wasn’t coming home for a while…

The sun sets and the attendees calmly imbibe wine and eat snacks. A number of friends and family share their independently gleaned snippets of the story of Lulu’s aberration: a moment of madness where she put everything aside – just for a little while – and what happened next…

Bizarre unsettling phone calls to the raucous family home precede a quiet revolution as Lulu, without any means of support, inexplicably goes walkabout along the magnificent French Coast: living hand-to-mouth and meeting the sorts of people she never had time to notice before. Through interactions with strangers she learns about herself and at last becomes a creature of decisions and choices, rather than shapeless flotsam moved by the tides of events around her…

Related with seductive grace in captivating line-&-watercolours, here is a gently bewitching examination of Lulu’s life, her possible futures and the tragic consequences of the mad moment when she rejects them all. Unfolding with uncanny, compulsive, visually magnetic force, and told through and seen by the people who think they know her. This isn’t some cosmic epic of grand events, it’s a small story writ large with every bump in the road an unavoidable yet fascinating hazard. None of the so-very-human characters are one-sided or non-sympathetic – even alcoholic, often abusive husband Tanguy has his story and is given room to show it.

Ultimately, Lulu’s gradual, hard-earned resolution is as natural and emotionally rewarding as the seemingly incomprehensible mid-life deviation which prompted it…

Slow, rapturous and addictively compelling, Lulu Anew is a paragon of subtlety and a glowing example of the forcefully deceptive potent power of comics storytelling. Every so often a book jumps comics’ self-imposed traditional ghetto walls of adolescent fantasies and rampaging melodrama to make a mark on the wider world. This elegiac petit-epic makes that sort of splash. Don’t hesitate: dive right in.
© Futuropolis 2008, 2010. © NBM 2015 for the English translation.

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Miss Don’t Touch Me volumes 1 and 2


By Hubert & Kerascoët, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-544-3 (TPB) & 978-1-56163-592-4 (TPB)

Hubert Boulard was a French comics writer and colourist who died suddenly on February 12th 2020. He is criminally unknown in the English-speaking world.

“Hubert” was born on January 21st 1971, and after graduating in 1994 from the École régionale des beaux-arts d’Angers, began his comics career as an artist for seasoned pros such as Éric Ormond, Yoann, Éric Corberyan, Paul Gillon and others. He started writing strips for others in 2002, with Legs de l’alchimiste limned by Herve Tanquerelle, followed up with Yeaux Verts for long-term collaborator Zanzim.

He produced another 14 separate series – many of them internationally award winning like Les Ogres-Dieux and Monsieur désire? – and in 2013 contributed to collective graphic tract Les Gens normaux, paroles lesbiennes gay bi trans: released to coincide with France’s national debate on legalizing same sex marriage.

His final book was with artist Zanzim. Peau d’homme – a comedy exploring gender and sexuality at the height of an era of medieval religious intolerance and social stratification – was posthumously published in June 2020… and is as yet unavailable in English translation.

Debuting in 2006, Miss Pas Touche was Hubert’s third scripting venture and remains arguably his most successful. It was originally released as four volumes in France, which – when translated by NBM – were delivered as two deliciously wicked tomes…

This slim, sleek initial translated tome offers a superb period murder mystery from visual creators probably best known in the English speaking world as contributors to Joann Sfar & Lewis Trondheim’s Dungeon series of interlinked fantasy books.

Here, Paris at the end of the 19th century is plagued by its very own Jack the Ripper – a knife-wielding maniac dubbed “the Butcher of the Dances” because he picks his victims from lower class girls frequenting suburban Tea-dances where the young people gather…

Blanche is a maid in a fine socially prestigious house: pious, repressed and solitary, unlike her sister Agatha – also a maid in the same residence – who is fun-loving and vivacious. They share the attic room at the top of the house where one night, Blanche accidentally sees “the Butcher” at his bloody work through a crack in the wall.

He sees her too, and some nights later she finds Agatha dead, as if by her own hand. Blanche knows what must have really happened…

Anxious to avoid scandal, the mistress of the house dismisses Blanche, who is forced to fend for herself on inhospitable streets. Through a combination of detective enquiry and sheer luck, she finds a lead to the killer and secures a position in The Pompadour, the most exclusive brothel in the city. By catering to a rich and powerful elite, here she will find the Butcher and exact her revenge…

Originally published in France as La Vierge du Bordel and Du Sang sur le Mains, this witty, and hugely engaging crime conundrum cleverly peels back its layered secrets as our star finds a way to turn her steadfast virginal state and overwhelming frustration to her advantage amidst the decadent rich and sexually bored of Paris. Maintaining her virtue against all odds, Blanche discovers the other side to a world she previously despised, while valiantly achieving her goal, even though it threatens to topple two empires!

Feeling very much like a cheeky grown-up version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1905 novel A Little Princess, this saucy confection from writer/colourist Hubert is delightfully realized with great panache by the Kerascoët to the delight of a wide variety of grown-up readers.

 

Miss Don’t Touch Me volume 2

Let’s return to the eclectic world of the French demi-Monde – in the oddly inappropriate guise of formerly naive and still virginal ex-housemaid Blanche, who one night espied a psychopathic murderer at work. Intent on silencing the pesky witness, “the Butcher of the Dances” mistakenly killed Blanche’s sister Agatha in her stead, before the surviving sibling was unceremoniously sacked by her employers to avoid scandal.

Thrown onto the streets of fin de siècle Paris, our pious innocent found refuge and unique employment within the plush corridors of the city’s most exclusive and lavishly opulent bordello. Fiercely hanging on to her virtue against all odds, Blanche became Miss Don’t Touch Me: a spirited – and energetic – proponent of the “English Method” – specifically, an excessively enthusiastic flagellating dominatrix, beating the dickens out of men who delighted in enduring exquisite pain and exorbitant expense. The first volume ended with justice for both Blanche and the Butcher but her adventures were not over…

This delightfully audacious and risqué sequel opens with Blanche – virtue still notoriously and profitably intact – as the Pompadour’s most popular attraction, even though the magnificent edifice is undergoing an expensive and disruptive refit.

However, she is deeply unhappy with her life and tries to flee, buy and even blackmail herself out of her onerous contract. She is soon made brutally aware of how business is really done in the twilight world of the courtesan-for-hire…

Utterly trapped, Blanche loses all hope, even while becoming gradually enamoured of Apollo-like young dandy Antoine: one of the wealthiest men in the country and a man apparently content to simply talk with her. Complications mount when her unscrupulous, conniving mother returns to Paris and begins to avail herself of the surviving daughter’s guilt-fuelled generosity and social contacts…

Blanche’s velvet-gloved imprisonment seems set to end when her bonny bon vivant boy begins to talk of marriage, but just as suddenly, her life at the brothel begins to radically unravel. Obviously the aristocrat’s dowager mother has no stomach for the match, but social humiliation is not the same as the malicious lies, assaults, attacks and even attempted poisoning Blanche experiences.

Moreover, the genteel dominatrix’s mother seems to hold a hidden secret concerning Antoine’s family and, if they are to be wed, why doesn’t the prospective groom want his bride-to-be to give up her day – or more accurately – evening job?

Originally published in France as Le Prince Charmant and Jusqu’à ce que la Mort Nous sépare, this enticing, knowing and hugely enthralling tale trumps the inspired murder-mystery of the introductory volume with a turbulent period melodrama of guerrilla Class Warfare that promises tragic and shocking consequences, especially after Antoine abruptly vanishes and the apparently benevolent brain surgeon Professor Muniz begins his terrifying work…

A compelling saga stuffed with secrets, this engagingly sophisticated confection from writer/colourist Hubert, illustrated with irrepressible panache by Kerascoët (married artistic collaborators Marie Pommepuy & Sébastien Cosset) will further delight the wide variety of grown-up readers who made the first book such a popular and critical success.
© 2007 Dargaud by Kerascoet & Hubert. All Rights Reserved. English Translation © 2007, 2008, 2010 NBM.

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Joe and Azat


By Jesse Lonergan (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-570-2 (TPB)

I’m writing this well in advance of publication, with the British media resolutely awash with the worst of all possible candidates for a new Prime Minister. That is of course excluding the one we still have – and cannot seem to pry loose from office. It’s actually comforting to remember that it could always be worse. Here’s a delicious example of a true tale with a hidden message…

Global traveller and cartoonist Jesse Lonergan (Flowers and Fade; Hedra) was born in Sacramento, California, raised in Saudi Arabi and Vermont and then spent two years as an American Peace Corps volunteer, before settling down as an artist and storyteller.

That stint was in the nation of Turkmenistan in the days when the Soviet Union’s collapse released many countries from seven decades of iron repression…

Granted autonomy and self-rule virtually overnight, a lot of Warsaw Pact countries didn’t fare well with instant democracy or Free Market Capitalism. In Turkmenistan, their new leader was also their old one.

Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov became First Secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party in 1985, and was leader of the country until the 1991 coup and revolt that established an independent Turkmenistan. Then – as “Turkmenbashy” – he ruled as president until his sudden and suspicious death in 2006.

The election was on 21st June 1992 and he was the only candidate running, and in 1994 extended his term of office until 2002 through a plebiscite whose official result gave him 99.9% of the vote (because “everybody likes him”). In December 1999, Parliament  – all of whom he hand-picked – spontaneously appointed him President for Life…

As you’d expect, he was a real pip, renaming the days of the week after himself, adding portions of his autobiography to the official driving test requirements and using the nation’s entire budget to send a book of his poetry into space. In a pitifully arid country, he built a river through his capital city – because all great cities have rivers running through them. Images of the ruthless potentate were everywhere: it’s a shame nobody ever found oil in the country… oh wait. They did…?

Seriously though, if you admire the precept that “truth is stranger than fiction”, you will have as much fun reading his Wikipedia page as this superb, charmingly subtle tale of culture shock pretensions and national misapprehensions that begins as young Joe grapples with the outrageous differences between his (mostly) liberal and wealthy homeland and the rules, laws and ingrained prejudices of a newly liberated society still reeling from the scary potentials of liberty and personal autonomy.

Nervous and alone, the Yankee lad slowly finds a friend in the astonishingly upbeat and forward looking Azat: an ambitious Turkmen convert and eager zealot for “The American Way”. Subsequently, most of Joe’s time is spent futilely apologising and explaining what that term actually means, since current reality is as far removed from the US Movies Azat is addicted to as the decades of Russian propaganda he grew up with.

Becoming almost part of the family – as complex and dysfunctional as any western one – Joe is caught in the tidal wave of Azat’s enthusiastic aspirations and daily frustrations, but never seems able – or willing – to staunch or crush them, even though he knows how hopeless they ultimately are…

Poignant, bittersweet, with an end but no conclusion, this is a superbly understated graphic dissertation on the responsibilities and power of friendship, the toxicity of unattainable dreams and the unthinking cruelty of cultural imperialism and unchallenged tyranny. Illustrated in a magically simplistic and irresistibly beguiling manner, Joe and Azat is a delight for any reader searching for more than simple jokes and action. Reading this would actually be time very well spent and could easily change your outlook…
© 2009 Jesse Lonergan. All rights reserved.