Category: Mature Reading

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Gag on This: the Scrofulous Cartoons of Charles Rodrigues


By Charles Rodrigues, edited by Bob Fingerman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-856-4

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Sick, Sick, Sick – the ideal antidote to Seasonal Saccharine Overload… 9/10

Charles Rodrigues (1926-2004) is one of the most influential – and certainly most darkly hilarious – American cartoonists of the last century, but when papers and periodicals began abandoning en masse the grand tradition of spot gags in the 1980s he and his illustrious compatriots began to fade from cultural consciousness. Now it seems almost nobody remembers him but thankfully companies like Fantagraphics are doing their bit to recall and immortalise him and them…

Rodrigues’ surreal, absurd, insane, anarchic, socially disruptive and astoundingly memorable bad-taste gags and strips were delivered with electric vitality and galvanising ferocity in a number of magazines. He was most effective in Playboy, The National Lampoon (from the first issue) and Stereo Review – the pinnacle of a career which began after WWII and spanned nearly the entire last half of the 20th century in every type and style of magazine.

After leaving the Navy and relinquishing the idea of writing for a living, Rodrigues used his slice of the G.I. Bill provision to attend New York’s Cartoonists and Illustrator’s School (now the School of Visual Arts) and in 1950 began schlepping gags around the low-rent but healthily ubiquitous “Men’s Magazine” circuit.

He gradually graduated from girly-mags to more salubrious publications and in 1954 began a lengthy association with Hugh Hefner in his revolutionary new venture, whilst maintaining his contributions to what seemed like every publication in the nation buying panel gags: Esquire to TV Guide, Genesis to The Critic.

He even found time to create three strips for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate – Eggs Benedict, Casey the Cop and Charlie.

The quiet, genteel, devout Catholic’s lasting monument and undisputed magnum opus, though, was the horde of truly appalling sick, subversive, offensive and mordantly, trenchantly wonderful one-offs he crafted on a variety of favourite themes for The National Lampoon, whose editor Henry Beard sought him out in the earliest pre-launch days of 1969, and offered Rodrigues carte blanche, complete creative freedom and a regular full-page spot.

He stayed aboard from the 1970 debut until 1993, a mainstay of the legendary comics section with sickeningly brilliant results which were recently compiled preceding edition Ray and Joe…

Here bracketed by a copious and informative biography by Editor Bob Fingerman and a heartfelt ‘Introduction’ by brother-doodler and sometime Cartoon Editor at the shockingly indulgent Lampoon Sam Gross, this monumental monochrome collection – presented as a sturdy hardback digest tome – features a staggering selection of explosively hilarious, wittily twisted visual broadsides gathered into a smart procession of tawdry topics…

After starting out lambasting our most basic drives in ‘Dirty Cartoons for Your Entertainment’ and ‘A Peeping Tome’, focus soon shifts to weird fantasy in ‘Moon Madness’ and contemporary traumatic tropes in ‘Assassin’ before going too far, too soon with some ‘Cartoons Even We Wouldn’t Dare Print’…

Because one can never get enough, it’s quickly back to basics with ‘Cartoons of a Sexual Nature’ after which other appetites are quashed with ‘Cuisine de Machine’ exposing the horrors only automats and vending machines can inculcate whilst ‘Would You Want Your Daughter to Marry One?’ deals with freaks and outcasts at their most intimate moments of weakness…

Some truly outrageous innovations are launched and sunk in a large section devoted to ‘Entrepreneurs’ before controversy is courted – and subsequently walks off with a huge settlement – in ‘Goddam Faggots!’ after which more societal hypocrisies are skewered in ‘Handicapped Sports’ and things get good and bloody in ‘Hemophunnies’.

Rodrigues was blessed (or cursed) with a perpetually percolating imagination and eye for the zeitgeist, so the contents of ‘The Celebrity Memorabilia Gallery’ are truly baroque and punishingly peculiar whereas ‘Hire the Handicapped’ merely offers genuinely groundbreaking solutions to getting the less-able back to work before this selection of Good Works concludes with much needed advice on ‘Good Ways to Kill: A Rock Performer!’…

Trenchant observation informs the visual catalogue of ‘Man in Morgue’ but it’s just sheer bad taste in play with follow-up chapter ‘Man in Toilet’ and macabre relationship counselling for ‘Men’s Liberation’ (in dealing with wives or mothers).

At the halfway stage of this colossal collection there’s time for ‘More Handicapped Sports’ before poking fun at the blind in ‘Out of Sight’, exploring the particular wrinkles of ‘Senior Sex’ and dutifully re-examining ‘The Seven Deadly & Other Sins’ – which you will recall include Pride, Envy, Anger, Covetousness, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Anti-Colostomyism, Conformity, Vomitry, Bitchiness and Dalmatianry – and then galloping off at a strangely artistic tangent to present ‘Sex Cartoons Drawn With a Hunt Pen’…

Scenes (never) overheard at the ‘Sex Change Clinic’ naturally segue into an itemised itinerary of disasters involving ‘Sex Robots’ and naturally culminate in ‘More Cartoons Even We Wouldn’t Dare Print’ and another period of play for ‘Handicapped Sports’…

All aspects of human misbehaviour appealed to Rodrigues’ imagination and many are featured in ‘Sexentrics’ and its playful sequels ‘Sexports’ and ‘Sleazy Sex Cartoons’, all of which quite naturally lead to ‘Life on Death Row’…

Unwholesome variety (and a penchant for conspiracies) is the spice of ‘A Group of Cartoons Requested by S. Gross’ before deviating eastwards to expose ‘Soviet Sex’ and heading back to jail to walk ‘The Last Smile’.

Shambling into the hilarious last lap we endure some ‘Tough Sex’, show ‘Cartoons About the Blind (The Kind They Wish They Could See)’ and get gritty in ‘Sons of the Beaches’ before heading to the ‘…Circus!’ and ending everything with ‘Those Darned Serial Killers!’…

These horrific and hilarious assaults on common decency celebrate and commemorate a lost hero of popular cartooning and consummate professional able to turn his drawing hand to anything to get the job done. This is another astoundingly funny gag-art grimoire brilliantly rendered by a master craftsman and one no connoisseur of black comedy will want to miss.
This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Book. All strips and graphics by Charles Rodrigues © Lorraine Rodrigues. Introduction © 2015 Sam Gross. Biography © 2015 Bob Fingerman. All rights reserved. This edition © 2011 Fantagraphics Books.

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The Complete Adventures of Cholly & Flytrap


By Arthur Suydam with John Workman, Chris Eliopoulos & Annie Parkhouse (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-767-1

Win’s Christmas Recommendation: Merry, Manic Mayhem… 8/10

Arthur Suydam comes from an impressive American dynasty of acclaimed artists harking back to the birth of the nation, but whereas they excelled in gallery painting and architecture, their polymath descendant has divided his time, talents and energies between sequential art and music.

Probably best known (unless you’ve seen him playing with Bruce Springsteen) today as a creator of stunning Zombie art, Suydam’s other signature graphic enterprise has been the perilously peripatetic and gorily satirical burlesques of an inseparable duo of legendarily post-apocalyptic weirdoes dubbed Cholly & Flytrap.

As noted in this lavish hardcover complete collection, the illustrator, author, designer, screenwriter and composer/musician has, since the 1960s, peddled his anarchically humorous, offbeat confections in such disparate venues as Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, Penthouse Comix and Epic Illustrated (where many of these brutally madcap little graphic novellas first appeared – specifically issues #8, 10, 13, 14 and 34); comicbooks like Tarzan, Conan, Batman, House of Mystery, Walking Dead and Marvel Zombies plus movie spin-offs Aliens and Predator.

He has also produced covers for novels including Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s collaborative Dead Street and Game-box art for Touch the Dead. Periodically the always-busy Suydam returns to his own uniquely skewed creative projects such as Mudwogs and the mirthfully militaristic muck-ups of his bombastically bloody buddies, teasingly releasing another snippet every so often…

Lavishly grotesque, wickedly wry and surreptitiously subversive, Cholly & Flytrap is a bold blend of dryly witty pastiches combining elements of Moebius’ Arzach, the sci-fi tinged cultural iconoclasm of Vaughn Bode and a surreal anti-war temperament as pioneered by EC Comics which imbues the constant and blackly comic ultra-violence with a hauntingly tragic and educative undertone.

Long ago the space-barge Exodus II crashed on an uncharted world. After untold ages the survivors have bred but never prospered, locked as they are in the constant struggle for survival. It’s not that the planet is particularly inhospitable… it’s just that the denizens – indigenous and not – adore war-making and love killing. Gosh, it’s so very much like Earth…

In the early 1970s Cholly began life as a bat-riding warrior: an inspiration (and eventually poster advert) for the animated Heavy Metal movie, but it was mysteriously transformed into a hot chick on a pterodactyl after acceptance (this sort of inexplicable conceptual metamorphosis happens a lot in film-land), leaving Suydam with the rights to a cool-looking visual and a lot of ideas…

Time passed, Marvel started a creator-owned, rights-friendly fantasy periodical in response to the success of Heavy Metal and that reinvented bat-riding, goggles-wearing avatar of conflict started popping up. Of course, he had evolved slightly whilst the chiropteran had become a colossal, dauntingly naked, bald fat Chinese man. Cholly still rode him like a seasoned Ace, though…

Augmented by a wealth of original art studies, sketches and finished paintings, the ‘Introduction by Max Weinstein’ offers contemporary background, history and critical expression before the exigent exploits (gathered in the order of the 2004-5 repackaged reprints from Image Comics) begin with ‘Chapter 0’ (plotted by Peter Koch) as the restless wanderers haul up at their favourite restaurant for a feed. Impatience, hunger, foreign food cooked by scurrilous talking bugs and honking big guns never make for a sedate evening…

This yarn is neatly stitched together with a later tale (originally entitled ‘A Little Love, a Little Hate!’ from 1981); a frenetic chase/duel between a foul-mouthed, flying-jacketed war-hawk and his slug-like arch-enemy, which showed Cholly’s streetwise cunning in spectacular, over-the-top, take-no-prisoners fashion.

That neatly segues into extended saga ‘The Rites of Spring‘ where Suydam expanded his cast and extemporized on the concept of mortals as organic war machines in a Horatian paean of Thermopylan courage on a world where combat is the natural order.

With Cholly and faithful, mute Flytrap stubbornly holding back a veritable horde of slug-troopers and colossal war-wagons, this is a smart and lusciously graphic feast of visual violence and sassy back-chat…

‘Flightus Interuptus’ follows; an airborne tussle (possibly started before the previous tale?) wherein the high-flying Cholly, sans his humanoid steed, harasses a massive mammary zeppelin-bomber in nothing more than a primitive tri-plane pulled and supported by a brace of the planet’s autonomous, levitating anti-gravity breasts – and no, that’s not a misprint…

Shot down in the throes of victory, the adaptable aviator finds a giant bat to ride (remember kids, recycling even of ideas and art is good for any planet). Sadly the noble beast doesn’t last long before ‘The End’ sees the unseated aviator tooling around the sky with a pair of those flying hooters strapped to his appreciative feet until he encounters a monolithic monster having a furious argument with his own outrageously outspoken boy-bits. Passions aroused and tempers flaring, Cholly is witness to a conflict resolution you simply don’t see every day…

Soldier and human(ish) steed are reunited for ‘Chapter 6’ (with additional text by Bob Burden) as Cholly and a couple of fellow warriors battle slug-troopers to secure a downed freighter’s supplies and end up falling into the oddest sort of hell…

‘The Adventures of Cholly and Flytrap Part II’ commence with their explorations of the scarily Eden-like valley and its buxom, welcoming inhabitants. It’s almost a relief when the Devil pops up to deal with them, but happily Flytrap has a counter to his Final Solution…

The remainder of the comics extravaganza is dedicated to a vast and sprawling pseudo-noir pastiche entitled ‘Center City’, set in a brooding metropolis indistinguishable from 1930 New York or Chicago… except for the aliens, robots, mutants and monsters…

Vile, crippled gang-boss Emiel Luvitz runs the rackets and makes most of his money from the citizens’ gambling on his prize-fighting operation. It helps that he also owns the undisputed “Champ” – slow-witted, gigantic, super-strong Stanley Yablowski – who has never lost a bout or let an opponent live…

Cholly & Flytrap don’t care, they’re only in town long enough to scrape up some ammunition and get drunk, but when The Champ and his minders invade the dive they are patronising, things go south pretty quick.

The hulking bully wants some fun but when he forces the silent Chinaman into an arm-wrestling contest – and loses – all hell breaks loose…

Watching the brief but ferocious struggle is rival mobster and fight-promoter One-Lunger who instantly sees a way to topple Big Wheel Luvitz. Killing Cholly and shanghaiing Flytrap, the callous thug drags the protesting mute all over the world, training and building up the heartbroken yet still-resisting, silent giant into a successful, popular mystery contender who can possibly beat the Champ…

Center City soon becomes a Shakespearian nightmare as Luvitz, seeing foes all around him, begins a paranoia-fuelled campaign of terror, killing or alienating everyone around him even as One-Lunger and his over-the-hill robotic trainer Pop prepare their captive combatant for the grudge match that will settle the fate of the maddened municipality.

What nobody realises yet is that Cholly isn’t actually dead. Slowly stalking the unwary mobsters, he’s anticipating some extreme violence to get his beloved bosom buddy back…

Smart, devious and utterly compelling, this is a splendidly hilarious, wickedly gratuitous OTT tale to make Wagner or Brecht sit up and take notes…

Supplementing the graphic wonderment is a ‘Cover Gallery’, a vast portfolio of monochrome sketches, working drawings and finished paintings, a studious and multi-generational essay on ‘The Suydam Legacy in New York’ plus a photo-packed, celebrity stuffed ‘Biography’ of the dauntingly gifted Arthur…

This is a sumptuous, exuberant and entrancingly daft slab of eye-candy that will astound and delight all canny fantasists.
Cholly and Flytrap ™ & © Arthur Suydam 2015. All Rights Reserved. All other art and trademarks are the property of their individual rights holders.

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An Android Awakes


By Mike French & Karl Brown (Elsewhen Press)
ISBN: 978-1-908168-63-4

It’s been a while since we looked at anything experimental so here’s an intriguing blend of illustrated book and graphic narrative which has a lot to recommend it.

In the world that’s coming, human beings are in decline and androids on the ascendant. Sadly our synthetic successors are prey to all the emotional foibles and insecurities we were. They’re very much like us except they can eat rivets and get really hammered on oil…

They especially have an overwhelming desire to experience fiction, even if the powers-that-be are as sleazy, quixotic, unpredictable, small-minded, corporate and blinkered as any meat-and-bone based publisher ever was…

Android Writer PD121928 is part of the Android Publishing Program. The state provides for his needs (drugs, whores, deep-frozen pets and the removal of his wife so that he can achieve the proper frame of artistic angst and squalor) and in return he conceives increasingly outré and wild adventure tales. It’s the same deal for every creative automaton in the system: Filmmakers, photographers, artists, whatever…

He hasn’t sold one yet which is becoming a bit of a problem since Android Writers are only allowed 42 submissions. If they can’t land a publishing contract before getting 42 rejection slips, they’re scrapped and another musing mechanoid gets his shot in the Program…

With the ignominious return of The Eating of Citizen Kane, PD121928 is down to his last 14 lives (a situation not unlike that of the succession of cats periodically thawed out to keep him company. It’s a shame they keep dying or going missing…) and the tension sends him into a paroxysm of creativity with us carried along on the surprisingly brief and exotic adventures of the pantheon of character-creations that have become so very real to the stressed creator…

Through the carefully crafted and impossibly interconnected stories of Finn, The Locust Wife, Abel Ford, Angel UK, Cai Lun, Richard Steinberger, The Great Explorer Umberto Amunsden, Commander Oleg, Aedus Cricklewood, JiéyÇ” The Detective and Mark, via recurrent motifs of mockingbirds and angel fish, the Android Writer pours out and repeatedly risks his life – even entering into unwise liaisons with a human prostitute on the Endangered List – as he struggles to survive and simultaneously wonders why he bothers…

Mike French’s beguiling, fantasy-vignette studded account of a creator-in-crisis is augmented by and combined with a wealth of raw and jarring monochrome illustrations from Karl Brown, but unlike most illustrated tomes these pictures are fully integrated into the text and often supplant the narrative entirely, detailing key moments of specific submissions such as ‘The Amazing Arctic Sinking Man‘, ‘OAP Extraction’, ‘The Antiquity of Zero’, ‘The Great Sea in the Sky’, or ‘The Sacrament of Abel Ford’ with extended sections of mute sequential art just like the heydays of European sci fi comics or classic 2000AD.

And then it’s time for Submission 42 and the desperately spiralling writer has a really different idea…

Overtones of Barrington J. Bayley, Christopher Priest and especially Michael Moorcock (when he was writing Breakfast in the Ruins) give this portmanteau of tales within tales a splendidly refined and timeless feel as a litany of cool ideas and stand-out characters weep out in the truncated (1000 words per…) yet expansively polished format of tomorrow’s word-counted entertainments…

Smart, challenging and well worth any jaded fantasist’s rapt attention.
Text © Mike French 2015. Artwork © Karl Brown 2015. All rights reserved.
An Android Awakes is also available as an eBook (ISBN: 978-1-908168-73-3)

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Sven Hassel’s Wheels of Terror: the Graphic Novel


By Sven Hassel, illustrated by Jordy Diago (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-878-6

Although his true history remains controversial and hotly contested in his home country, Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen AKA Sven Hazel AKA Sven Hassel is indisputably one of the most influential authors of the late 20th century. The fourteen novels bearing his nom de guerre/plume, based on his war-time experiences as a decorated soldier in the German army (and latterly as a POW), have sold 53 million copies worldwide, published in more than 50 countries, and a fair few of those were to readers who went on to create many of the last forty-five years’ worth of great war comics.

He was born in 1917 and, after turbulent times in the post-war years following his return to his fatherland, left forever his native Denmark in 1964 for Barcelona. He stayed put and peacefully passed away in there in 2012. Now, with his canon once more lined up for screen adaptations, his stories have finally begun the transition to the genre he so particularly inspired: graphic novels.

Published in 1953, Legion of the Damned was a colossal hit, delineating his entire time in the Army of the Reich, including prompt desertion, recapture, confinement and sentencing to a Penal Battalion on the Eastern Front.

The remaining thirteen books are elaborations of that book and period, offering greater depth and many more unforgettable moments of horror and camaraderie, which is presumably why these adaptations – by son Michael and granddaughter Mireia, illustrated with subdued yet expressionistic verve by Spanish artist and photographer Jordy Diago (Fix und Foxi, El Cuervo, the Disney Company) – begin with the second novel.

Wheels of Terror was first released in 1958 and is regarded by many as the ultimate anti-war novel; each chapter a gut wrenching, thought-provoking, seemingly pointless exploit in a never-ending succession of brushes with near-death, human brutality and the appalling consequences of total war as experienced by the diffident narrator and his comrades. Those include charismatic thief Joseph Porta, hulking Tiny, former Foreign Legionnaire Alfred Kalb, elderly Troop Sergeant “The Old ‘Un”, somehow still-religious Möller, aging Bauer, big, steadfast Pluto and the rest…

This oversized (296 x 208 mm) full-colour paperback opens with no preamble or fanfare with ‘Nox Diaboli’ as the old lags are driven into Hamburg during an Allied firebombing raid and used as a clean-up crew during the still on-going devastation. The worst part was probably the children’s home…

‘Furioso’ then pauses to introduce the cast as they return to the Eastern Front, but still lumbered with shifting corpses, “aided” by Russian POWs with whom they have far more in common than any German officer. ‘A Shot in the Night’ then describes an uneventful night in the barracks at the Sennelager Training Grounds involving a near-fatal confrontation with a martinet Sergeant-Major who has no time for convicts and unconventional Commandant Colonel Von Weisshagen. As usual, Porta’s nervy, anarchic impromptu antics turn potential catastrophe into a war-story worth retelling many times over…

Penal battalions get all the choice jobs and ‘State Murder’ describes what happens when the squad are ordered to execute prisoners – even young women – after which ‘Porta as Pope’ finds the still-distraught men gathered to drink and play cards whilst the indefatigable fixer regales his chums with the time he accidentally became padre to the barbarous counterattacking “Ivans” before Sven sneaks away to enjoy an unlikely ‘Love Scene’ with a woman living in the bombed-out ruins…

The account kicks into grim high gear with ‘Return to the Eastern Front’ as the dirty business of trench-fighting resumes in earnest, punctuated with moments of inactivity spiced up by Porta’s ribald stories and songs, but soon the gregarious scene-stealer is risking his life with our narrator at a forward listening post mere metres from the Russians where he learns that ‘At 11.30 AM the Germans Will be Blown Sky High’.

The subsequent devastating clash between advancing Ivans and a doughty crew of German flamethrower operators is appalling to witness and the pointless action soon leads to ‘Close Combat in Tanks’ with the reprobates stuck inside a malfunctioning Tiger, narrowly avoiding being butchered by the advancing enemy before having to fight for their lives in freezing close quarters at apocalyptic atrocity-site ‘Cherkassy’…

A relative moment of calm only gives the squad time to brood and indulge in torture masquerading as interrogation before ‘The Sneaking Death’ sees another firefight erupt, killing a third of the company…

In the bright day of a forest reconnaissance, loquacious Porta describes his favourite meal of ‘Mashed Potatoes with Diced Pork’ to the ones who made it, leading to a shockingly bloodless and almost comic confrontation with a Russki patrol before ‘The Partisan’ sees the scruffy survivors trying to help a girl rescue her already-arrested father from execution. Nazi fanatic Julius Heide then learns to his cost that the scum hate him as much as he despises them…

When the quartermaster asks the starving troops in all seriousness ‘What Do You Want to Eat?’ following an upcoming attack, the wary warriors realise the hell they’re about to enter, resulting in the loss of yet another cast regular, after which a frenzied retreat in tanks is interrupted by more murderous Soviets and a crazy interlude wherein Kalb risks everything to help a Russian woman in the final stages of ‘Childbirth’…

This story doesn’t end; the reader just finds a place to stop watching and that occurs here with ‘Long Live Death’ as the ravaged survivors hide in a trench with Ivans inexorably advancing. The grim moments pass as the convict soldiers observe how proper German officers die before finding two Soviet women soldiers who would rather stay with them than be returned to their male Russian comrades. And then the shooting starts again and your narrator is hit. Fade to black…

Grim, bleak, blackly funny and still ferociously forceful, this pictorial interpretation is a splendid first outing from all involved, deftly negotiating the minefield of how to keep the necessarily horrendous visual aspect from overpowering the events. Purists who love the prose novels might, however, feel cheated that some of the more racy (by today’s standards that might as well read as sexually exploitative) content has been toned down or expurgated, but all in all this is a book to satisfy old fans and make a legion of new ones.
© MHAbooks aps 2015. All rights reserved.

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Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist


By Bill Griffith (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-895-3

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Awesomely Educative Treat for Mystery Lovers… 8/10

Starting life as an underground feature in 1971, Bill Griffith’s absurdist commentary on American society Zippy the Pinhead has grown into such a prodigious and pervasive counter-culture landmark that it’s almost a bastion of the civilisation it constantly scrutinises and ridicules. What I never suspected before and – according to the revelations stunningly catalogued and depicted in this powerful and absorbing Graphic Memoir, nor did he – was the subtle influence the gods of cartooning had been constantly exerting upon his family’s lives for generations…

As much a detective yarn and memorial to simpler (but just as complex) times as a straight biography, Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist reveals how the cartoonist and social commentator (already long-schooled in the proud achievements of artistic ancestor and photographic pioneer William Henry Jackson) latterly uncovered further pictorial predecessors and briefly became an impassioned genealogist and investigator after an elderly uncle decided it was time to pass on a boxful of dusty family memorabilia.

An uneventful yet evocative journey from Connecticut to North Carolina – miles slowly passing as the traveller is immersed in internet research – starts memories flowing and when Uncle Alan then hands over a historical treasure trove the naturally contemplative cartoonist’s childhood memories are triggered and his instincts for a good story are piqued…

Bill’s thoughts continually return to his own childhood in Levittown when he and his passionate, beautiful, aspiring-author mother regularly posed for neighbour and legendary pulp illustrator Ed Emshwiller‘s many magazine covers, and by the time the voyager stops discussing the past Bill is powerfully aware of just how real and earthy and fallibly human his relatives were.

As yet however the discourse still offers no insight into why his own cold, abusive father turned out the way he did…

Meticulous Alan is a mine of useful minutiae with his catalogue of familial foibles and passed-down stories, but even he is un aware of Barbara Griffith (nee Jackson)’s greatest indiscretion: a fifteen year, full-on tempestuous love affair with cartoonist, cartooning-teacher, publisher, comicbook pioneer, crime-writer and indefatigably restless entrepreneur Lawrence Lariar: an innocuously smooth operator who, although moderately successful for his entire life, was in many ways the Forgotten Man of Comics.

With the flow of information now going both ways, Bill shares the day in 1972 when word came of his dad’s imminent death and of how, in a moment of overwhelmed, grieving guilt and with the family gathered at the hospital, his mother the widow of mere minutes confessed that she had been wife in all but name to another man since 1957…

As Bill further re-examines his own memories, cross-referencing with pictures, diaries and his mother’s epic unpublished novel which clearly and cleanly transfers her complicated life into the refuge of putative fiction, a series of pictures starts to form…

Startlingly frank, scrupulously detailed, diligently analytical and brilliantly reconstructed using a variety of styles, this is a fact-filled, graphic tour de force which elevates the players to the rank of perfect archetypes whilst still leaving them authentic, living creatures we are convinced we know.

Superbly applying the techniques of fiction to the discipline of documentary, Invisible Ink is a wonderful leap forward in the growing genre of comics memoirs and one no serious reader can afford to miss.
© 2015 Bill Griffith. All rights reserved.

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Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War on Terror)


By Benjamin Marra (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-878-6

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Comedy as Black as Santa’s Coal for Naughty Kids… 8/10

We live in perilous times and everywhere Terrorists lurk, just waiting to get the jump on us. Everybody knows that…

Mercifully, thanks to the blessed wisdom of President G. W. Bush there are professionals in place to take the war right back to them. Following the attacks on 9/11 the clearly-prescient Dubya, in his infinite wisdom, convened a team of All-American specialists in excessive force and clandestine skulduggery. They were designated as Terror Assaulters: utterly autonomous from government oversight and tasked with ending any and every threat to world Freedom & Democracy by any means necessary…

Thus the scene is set for a sly and ferociously stark satire on the American Public’s simplistic view of its pre-eminent role in a very complex world, conceived and concocted by a master of visual retro-stylisation, deftly utilising nostalgic forms to pillory modern sensibilities and the country’s obsessions with untrammelled masculinity, consequence-free sex, violence and conspiracy.

Benjamin Marra was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1977 and after graduating with a Degree in Fine Arts from Syracuse University studied in Florence (Europe!) where he was clearly seduced away from clear-thinking and right-mindedness. He later studied under David Mazzucchelli at the School of Visual Arts and, as well as running his own self-publishing comics imprint Traditional Comics, works as web designer for Major League Baseball Advanced Media, freelances for advertising companies, Marvel and in publications such as Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and many others.

Rendered in hard-edged, stiff-figured ink-lines, augmented by dot-screens and flat primal colours like a classic four-colour comicbook from the 1960s or 1970s (and looking and feeling very much like Spain Rodriguez’s iconic Trashman tales), these extremely over-the-top adult escapades are delivered with machine gun rapidity and bleak economy, all softness and nuance carefully excised in favour of inexpressive, declamatory, expository dialogue – like a little boy playing out scenes with action-figures until he smashes them all in his building frenzy…

Our harshly-drawn hero is an emotionless, lethally capable agent codenamed O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War on Terror) whose propensity to find trouble wherever it lurks is only outmatched by his capacity to expunge it with ruthless efficiency. And of course whenever there’s evil and death there also plenty of callous, selfish sex, with whoever is left breathing when all the shooting stops…

Our involvement begins with ‘Cyber Attack Part 1‘ wherein a perpetually sunglasses-wearing wonder man invades a nondescript business building in Jakarta and spectacularly kills all the bad guys before his search for ‘Funding’ leads him into a pitched, brutal battle on an airliner jam-packed with hijackers before a profitable meeting with the lizard-men who actually run everything…

Abruptly changing tack, ‘Cyber Attack Part 2’ reveals how, after Terrorists sneakily invade and conquer America, the Terror Assaulters lead the fightback; with the indomitable O.M.W.O.T. at the forefront of battle, exposing a TA traitor who is almost as deadly a fighter as he…

With America free again our ultimate hero then deals with another outrageous attack on decency when ‘Loyalties’ sees him framed for child abandonment by an invisible enemy using the latest gender-bending technologies to trap him in matrimony and a spurious child-support scheme. It’s the Terrorists’ greatest and most insidious and apparently inescapable trap…

Blending rebellious Punk Rock sensibilities with a trenchant, deadpan yet aggressive expressionism and irrevocably linking hyper-violence to loveless, self-gratifying casual sex, this so-very-graphic inquisition into the nature of a society’s obsessions and the excesses of its self-appointed protectors is a blackly hilarious attack on US interventions, NeoCon demagoguery and the self-delusions of the oppressed and near-extinct God-Fearing, White American Male that will delight and amaze all us dubious lefty, liberal-humanist weirdoes…
Terror Assaulter is © 2015 Benjamin Marra. This edition is © 2015 Fantagraphics Books Inc.

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Chicago – a Comix Memoir


By Glenn Head (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-878-6

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Momentous reading for Mature Minds… 9/10

One of the things comics can do better than almost any other medium is autobiography. Words are immensely potent but when wed to the images a confessor wants you to see and has devised especially for that purpose, the response is always immediate, visceral and permanent.

Cartoonist, illustrator and editor Glenn Head (Hot Wire, Snake Eyes, Weirdo) studied under Art Spiegelman at the School for Visual Art in the early 1980’s but has bided his time in commercial illustration for publications like Advertising Age, Screw, Sports Illustrated and The Wall Street Journal and with comix such as Guttersnipe and Head Shots before releasing his first graphic novel.

It was worth the wait…

In monochrome hardback Chicago Head has turned a harsh, stark spotlight on his own life, literally baring all as he details how a troubled teenaged virgin from New Jersey turned his back on the American Dream – as well as his own personal hopes and aspirations – touching bottom and courting madness before reaching his current (still tenuous) state.

Following an incisive Introduction from Phoebe Gloeckner, the history lesson begins in a graveyard in the Garden State. “Glen” is nineteen and troubled, but not necessarily unhappy: he’s just painfully aware that he doesn’t fit in.

It’s the summer of 1977 and he’s obsessed with the cartoons and paraphernalia of the hippie Counterculture which is experiencing its death-throes. Dad works on Wall Street and desperately wants to understand why his son seems at such a loss. The boy doesn’t even seem that happy to be going to Art School in Cleveland, even though he claims that’s what he wants…

What Glenn wants most, however, is Sarah: his best friend and a girl appallingly emotionally scarred by the treatment she has receive from her Holocaust-Survivor parents. She’s already well down the road to dissolution though: pregnant, a runaway and being used to turn tricks by her latest scumbag boyfriend…

The season turns and Glen reluctantly reports to the Cleveland Institute of Art, his intolerant, abrasive attitude winning him few friends amongst staff or students. There’s something indefinably wrong inside his head and before long he drops out and begins panhandling to survive. A casual conversation with another student attains the status of a sign from God and Glen – who we’re starting to think might suffer from manic Depression/Bipolar Disorder – abruptly hitchhikes to Chicago, determined to sell cartoons to Playboy magazine…

And thus begins an intense period of privation, hallucination, harassment by hustlers, constant danger and creeping horror, all punctuated by unexpected kindnesses from strangers, rejections, connections and moments of incomprehensible good fortune as chance meetings with Muhammad Ali and Robert Crumb begin to turn the street kid’s life around…

‘Decompression’ sees Glen back in comfortably suburban Madison, N.J. in January 1978, thanks to his amazingly understanding yet still-uncomprehending father, but although the threat of imminent starvation and murder have faded, the boy is still at risk – from his own actions after a telephone conversation with ideal inamorata Sarah’s manic mother and his own father’s poorly hidden handgun…

The final section of this diary occurs in 2010 as Brooklyn-dwelling single-dad Glen gets an email one morning. Sarah, the one that got away, the great missed opportunity, has tracked him down and wants to meet up. Is this his chance to stop being that painful, pathetic, unresolved 19-year old virgin at last?

Breathtakingly candid, intoxicatingly forthright and irresistibly visually exhilarating, Chicago is a stunning examination of the power of obsessions and memories and potential roadmap to finding your own identity as long as you have the nerve and stomach to try…
Chicago © 2015, Glenn Head. This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

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Green Arrow Volume 2: Here There Be Dragons


By Mike Grell, Ed Hannigan, Dick Giordano & various (DC Comics) ISBN: 978-1-4012-4326-5

Premiering in More Fun Comics #73 in 1941, Green Arrow is one of very few superheroes to be continuously published (more or less) since the Golden Age of American comicbooks. At first glance this blatant amalgamation of Batman and Robin Hood seems to have very little going for him but he has always managed to keep himself in vogue.

Probably his most telling of many makeovers came in 1987, when, hot on the heels of The Dark Knight Returns, writer/artist Mike Grell was tasked with making him the star of DC’s second “Prestige Format Mini-Series”.

Grell was one of comics’ biggest guns at the time. Beginning his rise with a laudable run on Legion of Super-Heroes, he went on to draw the revived Green Lantern/Green Arrow and practically saved the company with his Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired fantasy epic Warlord. He had also notched up a big fan following illustrating many Aquaman, Batman and Phantom Stranger stories before establishing his independent creator credentials at First Comics with Starslayer and Jon Sable, Freelance…

In the grim’n’gritty late Eighties, it was certainly time for another overhaul of the Emerald Archer. Exploding arrows yes, maybe even net or rope arrows, but arrows with boxing gloves or paint brushes on them just wouldn’t wash with a newer, more sophisticated readership. Thus, in an era of corrupt government, drug cartels and serial killers, the evergreen survivor adapted and thrived under the direction of a creator famed for the uncompromising realism of his work.

The Longbow Hunters focused on the superhero’s mid-life crisis as he relocated to Seattle and struggled to come to terms with the fact that since his former sidekick Speedy was now a dad, Oliver Queen had technically become a grandfather. Beside long-time “significant other” Dinah Lance – AKA Black Canary – he began to simplify his life, but the drive to fight injustice never dimmed for either of them.

Dinah went undercover to stamp out a drug ring whilst Ollie became engrossed in the hunt for a psycho-killer dubbed “The Seattle Slasher”. The archer also learned of a second – cross-country – slayer who had been murdering people with arrows…

Eschewing gaudy costume and gimmicks, Queen reinvented himself as an urban hunter to stop such unglamorous, everyday monsters, stumbling into a mystery which led back to World War II involving the Yakuza, CIA, corporate America and even the Viet Nam war, even as it introduced a deadly female counterpart to the beleaguered bowman: an enigmatic, morally ambiguous archer called Shado…

The intricate plot, subtly blending three seemingly separate stories which were in fact one, still delivers a shocking punch even now in its disturbingly explicit examination of torture: a treatment which won the series undeserved negative press when it was first published. Although possibly tame to most modern tastes, this was eye-opening stuff in the 1980’s, which is a shame, as it diverted attention from the real issue… and that was a massive surge in quality and maturity.

The intricate, maturely sophisticated plot – interweaving themes of age, diminishing potency, vengeance and family – were another turning point in American comics and led to an ongoing series specifically targeting “Mature Readers”. The treatment and tone heavily influenced and flavoured today’s TV adaptation Arrow and has led to the release of Grell’s nigh-forgotten urban predator tales in a new range of economical, no-nonsense, full-colour trade paperbacks.

This second collection, primarily scripted by Grell with superbly efficient and powerfully understated art from Ed Hannigan, Dick Giordano & Frank McLaughlin plus a few guest creators, re-presents Green Arrow volume 2, #7-12 (eccentrically cover-dated August through December plus “Winter” 1988), offering starkly authentic tales ripped from headlines that have as much impact and relevance today as they did nearly thirty years ago…

Sparse, Spartan and startlingly compelling, the drama begins – sans any preamble – with complex collaboration ‘The Powderhorn Trail’, written by Grell and Sharon Wright – who divided the Ollie and Dinah sections between them – with Randy DuBurque illustrating Black Canary portions whilst Ed Barreto pencilled the GA bits, after which Giordano & Arne Starr inked it all.

The round-robin episode sees the hunter (the series was notable in that other than on the cover, the soubriquet “Green Arrow” was never, ever used) stumbling upon a clue to drug-smuggling at his local carwash and having to explain to Dinah why he’s taking off for Alaska, even as she is approached by a casual acquaintance whose life she once saved, who inadvertently tips the Canary to a string of crimes-in-the-making…

The all-action conclusion (by Grell, Paris Cullins, Gary Martin & Giordano) then sees Ollie solo-stalking from Anchorage to deep in the North country on the trail of not just drug dealers and high-end car thieves but also opportunistic Tong smugglers trafficking illegal, poached and pointless Chinese herbal remedies under cover of the infamous Iditarod…

The remainder of this book deals with the eagerly-anticipated return of Shado in the 4-part ‘Here There Be Dragons’ (Grell, Hannigan, Giordano & Frank McLaughlin) which opens with the reunited Ollie and Dinah celebrating a birthday whilst still attempting to reconcile the changes in their life. As much as the after-effects of being brutally tortured still affect her, they trouble him far more…

Killing her tormentor haunts them both, as does the role the enigmatic Japanese archer played in the bloody drama. With the memories still poisoning the atmosphere, neither hero is particularly happy when sleazy CIA executive Greg Osborne comes back into their lives with another offer they’d better not refuse.

Far across the Pacific, Shado has fallen out of favour with the Yakuza masters who took a little girl and turned her over decades into a living weapon. When one arrogant young Oyabun overstepped his authority he turned her into an implacable foe of the entire organisation. Now to save face the criminal society must kill her at all costs…

In Seattle, Osborne blackmails Ollie, forcing him to go to the Philippines in search of the country’s gold reserves which have been hidden since the Japanese occupation in WWII. The current US administration wants to help its Eastern ally without being seen to be interfering, especially since a treasure map has surfaced and the Yakuza are using it to murderously appropriate the lost bullion.

The Japanese gangsters are simultaneously searching the islands for a mysterious dragon-tattooed woman archer who apparently has somehow won possession of the gold chart…

Dinah is unconvinced by Ollie’s reasons for going. She knows he is fascinated to the point of obsession with the exotic archer, but still stands aside as the hunter embarks for Hawaii. All too soon Queen’s specialised knowledge has put him on Shado’s trail, but that only makes him a perfect target…

A few weeks later, Ollie is slowly recovering from an arrow in the chest, nursed back to health from the edge of death by the beguiling tattooed woman; seduced as much by her arcane philosophy of archery as her beauty, compassion and air of fragility. In the quiet hours they grow closer and she shares her tragic origins with him, as well as the recent events which made her both free agent and fleeing fugitive.

Faced with the choice of defying Osborne or reluctantly handing her over to the American authorities pressurising him, Ollie is forced into a third option when Yakuza death-squads attack their isolated island retreat, prompting a prolonged chase through the region and a bloody trail impossible to cover-up…

The harassed quarry eventually double-back to Honolulu for a climactic final battle during which Ollie discovers how the Yakuza have been able to dog their steps so closely. He and Shado part for what he secretly prays is the last time, after which, armed with suspicions of exactly who Osborne is actually working for, Oliver confronts his blackmailer…

Terse scripts, intelligent, flawed human interactions, stunning action delivered through economical and immensely effective illustration and an unfailing eye for engaging controversy make these epic yarns some of the most powerful sagas American comics ever produced. Compiled here with a cover gallery by Grell (both fully painted and line art), Joe Rubinstein, Hannigan & Giordano, this compulsive retooling is yet another long-overlooked highpoint of superhero storytelling no lover of the genre will want to miss.
© 1988, 2014 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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If You Steal


By Jason (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-854-0

Christmas Gift Recommendation: A comics lover’s dream made real… 9/10

Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterrøy: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won that year’s Sproing Award (Norway’s biggest comics prize). He won another Sproing in 2001 for the series Mjau Mjau and in 2002 turned almost exclusively to producing graphic novels.

A global star among the cartoon cognoscenti, he has won many major awards from all over the planet. Jason’s work always jumps directly into the reader’s brain and heart, utilising the beastly and unnatural to gently pose eternal questions about basic human needs in a soft but relentless 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…

The stylised artwork is delivered in formalised page layouts rendered in a minimalist evolution of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style, solid blacks, thick outlines and settings of seductive simplicity – augmented by a deft and subtle use of flat colour which enhances his hard, moody, suspenseful and utterly engrossing Cinema-inspired world.

The superbly understated art acts in concert with his dead-on, deadpan pastiche repertoire of scenarios which dredge deep from our shared experience of old film noir classics, horror and sci fi B-movies and other visual motifs which transcend time and culture, and the result is narrative dynamite.

This latest hardback compilation collects eleven new short yarns and opens with the eponymous and eerie ‘If You Steal’, wherein cheap thug Paul perpetually risks everything and the one person who keeps him feeling alive in search of quick cash, only to lose it all in the end after which ‘Karma Chameleon’ finds a small desert community dealing with the discovery of a giant, carnivorous and extremely predatory lizard which nobody seems able to see. Good thing masturbation-obsessed boffin Dr. Howard Jones and his long-suffering daughter Julia are in town…

The deliciously wry and whimsically absurdist Samuel Beckett spoof ‘Waiting for Bardot’ then segues neatly into a dashing mystery of masked derring-do as ‘Lorena Velazquez’ eventually tires of waiting for her ideal man to finish off a necessarily interminable and horrific army of villains prior to doling out a maiden’s traditional rewards whilst a fugitive murderer narrates his own paranoia-fuelled downfall after his ‘New Face’ briefly tempts him with love and the never-to-be-achieved promise of peace and safety…

A series of six faux horror comics covers combines to relate the trials of chilling romances in ‘Moondance’ and the classic fear theme extends into a rip-roaring battle against the undead in ‘Night of the Vampire Hunter’ and ‘Polly Wants a Cracker’ follows the other unique career path of artistic legend/assassin-for-hire Frida Kahlo whilst a junkie musician pushes his luck against some very bad guys because ‘The Thrill is Gone’ before ‘Ask Not’ takes a trawl through history from Stonehenge in 2583 BC to Salon de Provence in 1554 AD (courtesy of Nostradamus) to 1960s Cuba, revealing the truth behind the assassination of JFK and Abraham Lincoln and what parts Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby actually played in that millennial plot: a parallel worlds yarn like no other…

The book ends with a stunning, deeply moving graphic examination of dementia which is both chilling and oddly-heart-warming as aging Emma deals with the scary creatures who keep taking away the names of things in ‘Nothing’, proving once more that behind the innocuous-seeming cartoons and contemporary fairy tale trappings Jason’s work is loaded with potent questions…

If You Steal resonates with Jason’s favourite themes and shines with his visual dexterity, and skewed sensibilities. disclosing a decidedly different slant on secrets and obsessions. Primal art supplemented by sparse and spartan “Private Eye” dialogue, enhanced to a macabre degree by solid cartooning and skilled use of silence and moment, all utilised with devastating economy, affords the same quality of cold, bleak yet perfectly harnessed stillness which makes Scandinavian crime dramas such compelling, addictive fare.

These comic tales are strictly for adults yet allow us all to look at the world through wide-open young eyes. They never, however, sugar-coat what’s there to see…
If You Steal is © 2015 Jason. All rights reserved.

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Sacred Heart


By Liz Suburbia (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-841-0

What would have happened when you were a teenager and your parents went away for the weekend?

What if they didn’t come back for four years? And what if the same thing happened to every household in your little town at the same time?

Visually, elements of Charles Burns and Johnny Ryan crackle beside graphic echoes of the Hernandez Brothers in a stunning graphic novel debut which tackles that conundrum with perspicacity, near-feral insight, righteous anger and a great deal of sentiment-free warmth in Sacred Heart.

As much mystery thriller as “Having Come of Age” tale, the mesmerising story opens in little everytown Alexandria which at first glance seems to have gotten a little rowdy of late, but for all the late-night drinking, hot-rodding, incessant partying, lewd behaviour and hijinks is carrying on as best it can.

The older teens are looking after the little kids, school is still attended, the local store still carries provisions and life goes on pretty much as before, even though there hasn’t been a responsible adult in situ for years…

Ben Schiller cares for her rapidly maturing – and consequently increasingly difficult – little sister Empathy; her life-long nerdy punk friend Otto still works part-time at the video store – when he’s not stealing girls’ panties – and he and she still watch weird movies most evenings, trading gossip and stories about who they’re currently seeing…

Elsewhere in their unique community, local garage-band The Crotchmen are the only good thing to see of an evening and Erica‘s baby still hasn’t come.

Jocks still act like meatheads and the pretty girls still chase them whilst standoffish Ben remains involved but apart. She isn’t ignored or reviled these days as she’s devised a method of tattooing which makes her a vital component of the new society…

Recently though, some of the little kids have been acting a little weird: descending into mysticism and fortune telling whilst default storekeeper Jack Brown is claiming that soon he won’t be able to get any more booze or gas for the town’s remaining functional cars, but of course the real downer is how many of the older teens have been found murdered in the last few weeks…

The kids all seem to accept the growing “Dead Kids Club” as a part of life in their little town, but as the summer of excess rolls on towards Fall, things start to change. Firstly Ben and Otto endanger the perfect friendship by bringing sex into the equation, after which an actual adult is seen in town but escapes and Crotchmen’s lead singer joins the casualty list and is replaced with a girl.

Hulking drummer Hugo starts planning how to take his little charges and break out to freedom as the kindergarten seers all predict the end of everything is coming, but worst of all, as colossal storm clouds gather, when Ben discovers who the serial killer is, she can do nothing about it…

Compiled and cunningly rearranged from her webcomic, Liz Suburbia’s Sacred Heart is a potent, uncompromising yet measuredly (proportionately??) hopeful glimpse at the teenagers who terrify all us old farts: dealing with a dangerous world not by crumbling as we assume they will, but by rising to the challenge and accepting the responsibilities we probably wouldn’t.

Gripping, compelling, rewarding and astoundingly readable, this is book to exult in from an author to watch.
Sacred Heart © 2015, Liz Surburbia. This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.