Category: Mature Reading

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Mercy: Shake the World


By J.M. DeMatteis & Paul Johnson (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels)
ISBN: 978-0-486-79905-6

Dover’s superb line of lost and rescued comics classics continues with a still-fresh and immensely innovative spiritual odyssey first seen in 1993, now resurrected in a softcover collection packed with fascinating extras and bonus material.

Originally conceived as one of a tranche of titles developed by Editor Art Young for the Disney Company’s ambitious but ultimately stillborn Touchmark adult comics imprint (the others being Sebastian O, Enigma and Shadows Fall) in the early 1990s, Mercy was first released as a 64-page one-shot comicbook in the initial wave of DC’s Vertigo line in 1993.

Thematically at odds with the dark, uncompromising and nihilistic fare of titles such as Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol and even the groundbreaking, bleakly lyrical Sandman, the astounding near-life experiences of Joshua Rose came and went relatively unremarked then, but at last gets a fair chance to shine here.

Preceded by an absorbing reunion between creators as transcribed in ‘About Mercy: Shake the World – a Conversation Between Writer J.M. DeMatteis and Artist Paul Johnson’, the phantasmagorical journey of revelation unfolds through a cascade of stunning painted visuals that begin in a coldly antiseptic hospital room…

Middle-aged and long-bled of all inner joy, Joshua Rose was almost glad when the stroke put him into a coma.

Jaded, world-weary, bitterly disappointed to his core, he has no illusions about life’s wonders or humanity’s merits. He lies inert in his exorbitantly expensive private clinical cell, impaled on and afflicted with dozens of tubes and needles and machines.

Seemingly dead to the world, he is in fact acutely aware of not just his own physical surroundings but also every inconceivable nook and cranny of universal time and space.

Spurning his wife and his world, Rose’s morose and twisted psyche roams infinity despising everything he sees in it, especially the miraculous mute woman glowing blue, constantly flashing across his consciousness and dragging him to uncountable encounters with people in all their pathetic, pitiful privation, sordid weakness, tawdry injustice and innate inescapable misery.

He derisively calls her “Mercy” but as she silently lures him ever onwards to scenes of family discord in London, an agonising personal trial in a primeval South American rainforest and a death-haunted, woe-infested apartment in Brooklyn, Joshua observes her tireless confrontations with monsters and worse and, somewhere deep inside, begins at last to change…

Crafted in true collaborative fashion by DeMatteis and Johnson, the deeply evocative and astonishingly expressionistic voyage of discovery is deconstructed in a number of extra features beginning with intriguing ‘Excerpts from the Outline’ exploring the writer’s initial plot concepts before being expanded with forensic intensity through illustrator Johnson’s beguiling monochrome ‘Page Layouts’.

Then, augmented by page after page of lavish and lovely full colour ‘Production Art’, character sketches and design roughs; accompanied by the artist’s thoughts on his process in ‘About the Art’, the entire delicious and eccentric delight is finally summed up in original editor Art Young’s laudatory ‘Afterword’, putting to bed one of the most intoxicating and passionate paeans to humble humanity ever crafted in comics form.

Mercy was different then and it’s still different now: an ideal confection for comics connoisseurs who remain forever bright at heart…

© 2015 Dover Publications, Inc. Introduction © 2015 J.M. DeMatteis and Paul Johnson. Art & text © 2015 J.M. DeMatteis and Paul Johnson. Afterword © 2015 Art Young. All rights reserved.

Mercy: Shake the World will be in stores from June 17th 2015 and is available for pre-order now. Check out www.doverpublications.com, your internet retailer or comic shop of choice.

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Criminal Macabre: The Third Child


By Steve Niles, Christopher Mitten & various (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-631-0

As illustrated by Jim Whiting, Steve Niles’ Cal McDonald first appeared in 1990 as part of the line-up in controversial comics anthology Fly in My Eye: Daughters of Fly in My Eye.

The hardboiled detective/horror-hunter then enjoyed his own serial in Dark Horse Presents #102-105 (1996), starred in two prose novels (Savage Membrane and Guns, Drugs and Monsters) before returning to comics with Niles’ 30 Days of Night collaborator Ben Templesmith limning the eponymous Criminal Macabre miniseries.

That was followed by loads more comics by many other artists and even another novel…

What I’m saying is that this guy’s been around, but you can pick up any book and get on with the business of being spooked whilst vicariously crushing evil with no appreciable head-strain. Then, when you realise you like what you see, you can track down the graphic novels, the Casebooks and the Omnibus Editions to prolong and expand the eerily electric experience…

In this latest compilation – collecting 2014’s 4-issue miniseries Criminal Macabre: The Third Child – the world’s most uncompromising monster-killer is coming to terms with the most unpleasant of occurrences and not coping well.

Despite years fighting against and alongside all aspects of the uncanny and supernatural, Cal has been in a bit of a dark place ever since he lost a battle and returned as a full-blown example of the undead. Now, as he haunts the darkest corners of Los Angeles, more bad news comes his way…

Whilst McDonald’s mind goes back to 1975 and his first fateful encounter with a destroyer of innocence, elsewhere it begins, as it always does, with people dying…

When two grotesque and infernal infants hit the mean streets they casually sow blood and death in their wake, inspiring everyone they meet – even unrepentant and merciless members of the city’s vast supernatural fraternity – to go on uncontrolled killing sprees. The wee kiddies are searching for the last of their kind. When they locate “The Third Child” they will all unite to end the world in a storm of rabid, infectious, hate-filled aggression…

When McDonald’s associates – Mo’lock the ghoul, Brobdingnagian Adam and a cop named Wheatley – finally locate the self-pitying avenger they quickly realise that he’s succumbing to the darkest urges of his new condition, but have important news.

The devil-babies have stirred things up so much the entire community has united. Even the vampires and werewolves are honouring a truce until the Earth is rid of the infant invaders… but they need a leader…

Meanwhile the terror-toddlers’ search for the missing waif has uncovered a potential candidate. Cal’s greatest enemy Jason Hemlock has clawed his way out of Hell and proclaims himself the third part of the Armageddon triumvirate.

He’s lying, but as the bodies mount up anyway and LA burns, the increasingly out-of-control Cal is running out of options to stave off the end of everything. And then, just as the assembled legion of monsters decide it’s every freak for itself, a reunion with his long dead dad affords McDonald the clue he’s been desperately searching for.

Armed with the knowledge of who and what the missing third is, Cal is ready to save the world again but is quite unprepared for the incredible consequences and his next uncanny evolution at war’s end…

Lightning-paced, dryly funny and spectacularly violent, Niles’ sparse and Spartan tale races along, beautifully and forcefully realised by illustrator Christopher Mitten, who also supplies an extensive and enthralling Sketchbook section.

No-nonsense monster-mashing mayhem at its best.

Text and illustrations ™ and © 2014 Steve Niles. All rights reserved.

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The Light and Darkness War


By Tom Veitch & Cam Kennedy (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-180-8

During the 1980s the American comics scene enjoyed an astounding proliferation of new titles and companies in the wake of the creation of the Direct Sales Market. With publishers able to firm-sale straight to retail outlets rather than overprint and accept returned copies from non-specialised vendors, the industry was able to support less generic titles and creators could experiment without losing their shirts.

In response Marvel Comics developed a line of creator-owned properties at the height of the subsequent publishing explosion, launching a number of idiosyncratic, impressive series in a variety of formats under the watchful, canny eye of Editor Archie Goodwin. The delightfully disparate line was dubbed Epic Comics and the results reshaped the industry.

One of the most evocative releases was a darkly compelling war/fantasy/science fiction serial with a beautifully simple core concept: Valhalla is real and forever…

Conceived and created by author, poet and comics scribe Tom Veitch (Legion of Charlies, Antlers in the Treetops, Animal Man, Star Wars: Dark Empire) and Cam Kennedy (Fighting Mann, Judge Dredd, Batman, Star Wars: Dark Empire) The Light and Darkness War originally ran from October 1988 to September 1989, just as that period of exuberant creative freedom was giving way to a marketplace dominated by reductive exploitation led by speculators.

Because of that downturn, this fantastic saga of martial pride and redemption through valiant service in the Great Beyond never really got the popular acclaim it deserved, hopefully something this glorious hardback retrospective compilation from Titan Comics will belatedly address…

Following heartfelt reminiscences and an appreciation in the ‘Foreword by Commander Mike Beidler, USN, Retired’ the astounding fable introduces paraplegic Vietnam war veteran Lazarus Jones, a broken, troubled warrior for whom the fighting never ended.

Home when he should have died with his inseparable friends, plagued with red-hot memories of beloved comrades lost when their Huey went down, by 1978 the wheelchair-bound wreck of a man is in a most parlous state.

Shattered by what will one day be designated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Laz cannot help making life hell for his devoted wife Chris. His miserable existence takes an even darker turn when Jones begins seeing visions of long-gone Huff, Slaw and Engle all calling him to join them.

A little later when Chris’ car crashes, Laz is severely hurt and left in a coma he might never awake from…

Elsewhere on the other side of Eternity, a shadowy shape speaks to Lazarus offering a choice: he can go back or he can join his long-departed brothers …

And thus begins a fantastic adventure as the half-man is restored to perfect health and reunited with those who know him best. The catch is that this afterlife is like nothing any holy book ever promised. It’s a vast cosmos of painful, unrelenting physicality where strange alien species commingle and Earth’s dead continue much as they had before.

Pilots steer gunships – albeit flying ones made of stone and levitated by little blue aliens called “menteps” – Leonardo da Vinci carries on inventing weapons for powerful lords and soldiers from every era have one more chance to serve and die…

Miraculously and joyously restored, Laz eagerly rejoins Engle, Slaw and Huff in the only thing he was ever good at. Manning a flying boat armed with light-powered weapons he becomes part of a vast force perpetually defying an unimaginable wave of invading evil from the Outer Darkness.

It’s a war with no overall plan or envisaged endgame, just eternal conflict, but recently a dark lord named Na has risen to the foremost rank of the “Deadsiders” and the legions of night seem to be gaining an advantage in the never-ending conflict fought on a million planets and a billion fronts…

For five hundred years however the genius da Vinci has created weapons that have checked the rapid advance and held the invaders to a tenuous stalemate, but Deadsiders are tirelessly patient and resort to inexorably taking worlds one at a time.

But now a novel event has taken place. Although Lazarus has happily enlisted in the army of Light comprised of those who died in battle on Earth, on the other side of the sky his body is still alive…

Stationed on besieged world Black Gate, Laz and the “Light Gang” are unable to prevent libidinous Lord Na from infiltrating and overcoming the planetary defences, but at least they save Governor Nethon‘s daughter Lasha from becoming the conqueror’s latest power-supplying plaything.

Although gradually winning the war for the dark, Na is impatient for a faster outcome. To achieve that end he had his necromancers rediscover an ancient, long-forgotten way to contact the Earth realm and dupes millionaire arms-dealer and devout Satanist Niles Odom into creating a device to physically bridge the dimensions.

Na’s wishes are simple; he wants earthly particle weapons, rail guns, atom bombs…

The unwitting dupe building Odom’s bridge is Nicky Tesla, a brilliant physicist whose intellect rivals that of his dead uncle Nikola, the wizard of electricity who once astounded the world.

With his clairvoyant girlfriend Delpha little Nicky has used his uncle’s old researches to complete an inter-realm gate for crazy-rich Odom, but when an army of zombies come through it and abduct him and Delpha nobody is prepared for what follows.

As the scientists are dragged across into an impossible world where Uncle Nikola is alive again, Laz and the Light Gang – following in Na’s wake – explosively head the other way…

They soon find themselves trapped on their birth-world, just as whole and hale as the day they died… and where Jones still languishes somewhere in a hospital bed.

With all the Afterworlds at stake they have no choice but to fight their way back to the War again…

Also included in this gloriously fulsome chronicle is a sketch-&-developmental art ‘Background Briefing’ by Veitch & Kennedy, discussing the Underground Comic origins and antecedents of the story as well as the history, physics and metaphysics of the Light and Darkness War and a potent overview and personal recollection from Stephen R. Bissette, ‘Endless War: The Life, Loss and Afterlife of Lazarus Jones’.

Fast paced, suspenseful, astonishingly imaginative and utterly beautiful to behold, the complex tale of Laz’s team and their struggle, how two generations of Tesla reshape a war that has been waged forever, and how in the end only love and devotion can battle overwhelming evil is a masterpiece of graphic endeavour and one no lover of fantasy fiction should miss.
The Light and Darkness War is ™ and © 2015 Tom Veitch & Cam Kennedy. All rights reserved.

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Empowered Unchained volume 1


By Adam Warren with Emily Warren, Ryan Kinnaird, John Staton, Takeshi Miyazawa, Brandon Graham & various (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-580-1

The trappings and minutiae of superheroes have finally become part of the contemporary conceptual consciousness, just as science fiction did in the 1960s and 1970s. As such the genre has finally laid itself open to the kind of loving ridicule and jocund spoofery which resulted in movies such as Galaxy Quest, Evolution, Mars Attacks, Woody Allen’s Sleeper or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Whilst superhero films haven’t quite reached those raucous heights (although Mystery Men and British TV’s Misfits come damn close) the social democratisation of the once niche – or perhaps ghetto – genre’s core concepts have at least resulted in a few tellingly effective and fondly outrageous comicbook series in recent years.

Indubitably one of the best and most engaging is Empowered, which details in excruciating detail the misadventures of haplessly charming hero-nerd Elissa Megan Powers, who, through events I’ll save for a later review, came into possession of an alien super-suit and quite naturally opted to join the ranks of the world’s already overcrowded super-champion community…

Although incredibly powerful, the hypermembrane outfit is shockingly skin-tight – which does nothing for her punishing body-image issues – and, despite being (eventually) self-repairing, tears at the slightest shock before taking its own sweet time to fix the gaping and revealing holes costumed combat regularly result in.

Moreover, since the dratted rag constantly malfunctions, “Emp” all too often ends up beaten, bound and saucily posted in humiliatingly revealing positions on social media by smirking villains.

Consequently she’s been saddled with a “D-list” rating and a tawdry reputation as a bondage icon with a pathetic “damsel-in-distress” problem. In fact even though she generally triumphs in the end, Empowered is considered to be the lamest “Cape” in the Masks-&-Tights game…

Created and crafted by US manga pioneer Adam Warren (Dirty Pair, Bubblegum Crisis, Gen 13, Livewires) and rendered in his signature “Amerimanga” style, the series – which launched in 2007 – soon spawned a number of even more outrageous guest-artist specials, now happily collected in this splendid monochrome and full-colour softcover compilation

Gathering the Empowered Specials: The Wench with a Million Sighs (December 2009), Ten Questions for the Maidman (June 2011), Hell Bent or Heaven Sent (December 2012), Animal Style (June 2013), Nine Beers with Ninjette (September 2013) and Internal Medicine (March 2014), this riotously sly, wickedly wry and extremely sophisticated smutty comedy also offers full biographies of the shameless collaborators, and in ‘Unchained Extras’ pre-colour cover line art plus masses of designs and sketches in pencil, pen, colour and even computer rendering from all the participants.

Of course the true payoff is the stories themselves beginning with ‘The Wench with a Million Sighs’. With a little title-art assistance from Emily Warren (no relation) Adam’s shot-from-pencils black-&-white art reveals how, whilst the pitifully overmatched Empowered is battling – and being ridiculed by – DNA hunting super-villain grave-robbers, safely back home her bodaciously insatiable stud-muffin insignificant-other Thugboy and BFF Kozue Kaburagi – AKA New Jersey hellion Ninjette – are being treated to the low-down on what makes Elissa tick…

The shameless narrator of the tell-all trivia is certainly the one who knows her best: immortal alien super-devil The Caged Demonwolf has been stuck on the indomitable lass’ coffee table ever since Emp stopped it from destroying Earth by trapping its diabolical essence within an extraterrestrial “bondage belt”…

Emily Warren graduated to co-illustrator with fifteen pages of colour craziness supplementing Adam’s monochrome sections in ‘Ten Questions for the Maidman’ wherein the Torn Titan’s odd relationship with the most terrifying crusader of the costumed community is examined via a tawdry celebrity chat show.

Blessed with no miraculous powers, what secret allows a mere man clad in a French maid outfit to overcome the mightiest foes and foil every threat to humanity? And why has the Dark-Knight Domestic chosen to break his customary silence on cheesy talk show Superstrong Words with BlitzCraig?

‘Hell Bent or Heaven Sent’ features guest creator Ryan Kinnaird for the colour section as Empowered joins the cleanup after a monumental battle featuring huge alien monsters and is relegated to dumping assorted wrecked remnants of “villainware” in the legendary off-planet “Joint Superteam After-Action Superdebris Storage Vault” with robotic champions Mechanismo and El Capitan Rivet.

Sadly even Techno-Capes and Cyberbros are just dirty little boys at heart and when a bored metal man’s private “sexyfiles” interact with the forbidden trashed tech, a plague of horny little cyber-angels and sensually pliable devil-girls are exported to the real world where their unquenchable chumminess manifests as a rapidly proliferating electronic STD…

Designer John Staton steps up to craft the lion’s share of manic battles in ‘Animal Style’ when an army of beast-based mecha-malevolents try to rip off the fabulous wonder cars and “…mobiles” from the 20th Annual International/Interchronal Alternate Timeline Superhero Auto Show…

Sadly for Terrorpin, Powerpachyderm, Brass Monkey, Cyberian Tiger, Supercobra and Maul Bunny the convention organisers have hired Empowered as a security guard and the cocky crimebots don’t take her seriously enough…

Transpacific manga star Takeshi Miyazawa (Lost Planet, Bound Raven, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane) comes aboard for a poignant all-monochrome exploration of Emp’s greatest gal-pal Kozue Kaburagi, detailing the appalling life and secret history of the New Jersey nemesis through ‘Nine Beers with Ninjette’ after which things end with a bunch of bangs as the latest invasion of Earth involves Empowered, Ninjette and a coterie of UberNurses from the Purple Paladin Memorial Hospital struggling to save a dying baby bioship before its excitable xenomorphic mother eradicates everything.

The main problem is that the cosmic infant is afflicted with sentient mites and the soppy heroes can see the pregnant parasites’ momma’s point of view too. Can the flighty girls find a solution that will accommodate both sides in this dire dilemma of ‘Internal Medicine’ (co-crafted by Brandon Graham, late of Prophet, King City and Multiple Warheads)?

Fast, smart, filthily funny in the best possible taste and ferociously action-packed, this is a deliciously immature and superbly addictive treat for all lovers of Fights ‘n’ (laddered) Tights fiction no fan with a secret life can afford to miss…
© 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Adam Warren, Empowered, Ninjette, Thugboy and all prominent characters and their distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Adam Warren. 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

In 2010 Bande Dessinée artist, writer and designer Étienne Davodeau completed a two-volume tale he’d started in 2008. Already popular, award-winning and extremely well-regarded for his reality-based and reportage style comics work, 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 such as The Initiates, Les Amis de Saltiel, Un monde si tranquille, Anticyclone, Les Mauvaises Gens: une histoire de militants.and Le Chien Qui Louches. Consequently he is now regarded as an integral part of the modern graphic auteur movement in French and Belgian comics.

NBM have translated and collected both volumes of the dreamily moody mystery into one stunning hardback edition and Lulu Anew is definitely going to be regarded as one of the very best graphic novels of the year – if not decade…

It all starts with a sort of wake as 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 goes down. The attendees calmly imbibe wine and eat snacks whilst a number of her 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, the gently bewitching examination of Lulu’s life, her possible futures and the tragic consequences of the mad moment when she rejects them all unfolds with uncanny, compulsive visual magnetic force.

Told through and as 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 inescapable 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 – and Lulu’s eventual 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 ghetto walls of adolescent fantasies and rampaging melodrama to make a mark on the wider world, and this elegiac petit-epic will make that sort of splash. Why not dive in now before the rush starts?
© Futuropolis 2008, 2010. © NBM 2015 for the English translation.

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A Town Called Dragon


By Judd Winick & Geoff Shaw, with Jamie Grant (Legendary Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-93727-840-3

Legendary Comics (a print adjunct of Legendary Pictures – responsible for the latest Batman/Dark Knight movies as well as The Hangover, Man of Steel and 300) is an outfit that seems to specialise in graphic narratives tailored for big screen film franchises, and this latest trade paperback release feels like their best potential blockbuster offering yet…

Gathering a 5-issue miniseries (from September 2014 to January 2015) this no-nonsense thriller-romp is written by Judd Winick, illustrated by Geoff Shaw and coloured by Jamie Grant, and opens just before the end with a valiant band of outsiders facing the most terrifying creature in history…

Flashing back to Norway a thousand years ago a bit of backstory reveals that at that time an army of Norse heroes slew the last dragon in the world… but not before an egg was laid.

The vile wyrms were the greatest threat to mankind ever known, fast, deadly and voracious. Only after uncounted deaths over centuries did the Northmen finally devise a way to kill the monsters, and then only when they had matured. Newborn dragons hatch out fast, starving and utterly invulnerable…

The deadly seed also proved to be immune to all efforts at destruction, but the wise men had learned that intense cold kept them from hatching. Thus, wary King Olaf Truggvason, after exhausting every effort to destroy the ominous ovoid, bade intrepid explorer Leif Erickson to take the damned egg to the other side of the world and leave it there in the coldest place he could find…

Discovering a new continent after an epic voyage, Leif and his dedicated followers carried the lethal load halfway across the country, climbed a snow-capped mountain, sealed themselves in a cave and lay down to die…

In 2014 Dragon, Colorado is just another small town in the skiing belt trying to attract the tourist dollar, but not every citizen is on board with the Mayor’s schlocky schemes to capitalise on the name by turning every store and public building into a simulated saurian playground.

Failed football star and Olympic javelin hopeful Cooper Runyon is happy with his diner as is, big city outsider and very bad waitress Kelly is more interested in making sculptures and farmer Pete just wants to sell produce, not gussy-up his cows into some kind of tacky petting zoo…

Sheriff Castro‘s kids Sam and Eric are having too much fun blowing up stuff to even get into drugs and other normal crap let alone dragons, solitary old man Garvey gives off a spooky CIA vibe and wants to be left alone and PhD. Malcolm just wants to study his ancient languages.

…And then there’s poor troubled, bi-polar Mickey who spends all his time scaling mountains like Devil’s Peak looking for a purpose to his life and perhaps a good way to die…

It’s whilst on one of those rash escapades that the climber discovers a bunch of German scientists secretly excavating a cave and, after alerting the disbelieving township, heads straight back up to the summit in time to see the egg hatch and all hell break bloodily loose…

Back home his crazy warnings aren’t disbelieved for long. Soon after he gets to town livestock starts disappearing, a strange lizard-skin is found in a tree and of course there’s the twenty-foot dragon ripping up Main Street and torching citizens just as a blizzard cuts off the rural paradise from all outside contact…

Trapped, terrified, vengeful but far from helpless, an unlikely team of heroes thrown together by a rather heavy-handed Fate are soon following instructions left by a thousand-years-dead Viking and attacking the greatest threat to modern humanity ever seen… but even after their astoundingly improbably triumph there’s a terrifying further threat in store…

Also incorporating a beautiful gallery of covers – in both pencilled and fully coloured final versions – this fast-paced, razor-sharp, witty and astoundingly action-packed monster mash rattles along with vivid characters and smart set-pieces in the manner of Tremors, Critters, Them! or perhaps even Bubba Ho-Tep: a satisfying scary rollercoaster romp tailor-made for transferral to the silver screen.

More please!
© 2015 Legendary Comics LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Angry Youth Comics


By Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-867-1

This book is full of rude and vulgar words, nasty sex and terrible pictures. There’s also lots of disgusting violence but that’s generally acceptable to most people.

So, if such adult-oriented material offends you, don’t read this review or the book.

You will however have to find something else to get angry and complain about…

Graphic narrative and cartooning, despite our regular protestations of comprising a comparatively small pond, cover a vast range of genres, formats, disciplines and tastes. From Tintin or Raymond Brigg’s Snowman through the various escapist mainstreams to the edgy, unpredictable and even the downright shocking.

Johnny Ryan is a comedian who uses comics as his medium of expression. Whether in his Prison Pit series, or his many commissions for such varied clients as Nickelodeon, Hustler, Vice, Arthur, National Geographic Kids and elsewhere, his job and passion is to make laughter. Depending on your point of view he is either a filth-obsessed pervert smut-monger or a social iconoclast using the same tactics as Hogarth, Gillray and Cruikshank or more recently Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks or Frankie Boyle to challenge the worst aspects of our society.

Ryan’s loose cartoon drawing style is deceptively engrossing and engagingly excessive whilst his seeming pictorial Tourette’s Syndrome of strips and gags – involving such signature characters as Boobs Pooter (world’s most disgusting stand-up comedian), Loady McGee & Sinus O’Gynus, Sherlock McRape and the incredible Blecky Yuckeralla (originally seen weekly from 2003 in The Portland Mercury and Vice Magazine before switching to Ryan’s own on-line site) – will, frankly, appal and baffle many readers, but as with most questions of censorship in a Free Society, the naysayers are completely at liberty to neither buy nor read the stuff.

Ryan dubbed his stinging graphic assaults on American Culture and Political Correctness “misanthropic comics” after first coming to public attention through his occasional comicbook series Angry Youth Comix.

Originally produced as self-published minicomics from 1994-1999, the strips were brought then to the attention of Fantagraphics by Peter Bagge and the company promptly commissioned a second volume.

Now this spectacular and colossal (424 pages, 273 x 184mm) monochrome hardback tome gathers all fourteen of those staggering assaults on “taste and decency” (first issued between 2001 to 2008) in one monolithic compendium of raucous, riotous baroque hilarity…

Ryan is a cartoonist with an uncompromising vision and an insatiable desire to shock and revolt whenever he wants to. In his ongoing Prison Pit series he perpetually pushes the graphic narrative envelope and the outer limits of taste with a brutal, primitive cascade of casual violence and there’s plenty of senseless carnage and casual slaughter on show here too, but deftly woven into a never-ending barrage of grossly outrageous confrontations and a barrage of bracing, despicable filth. Or you could just see the funny side of it…

In this non-stop welter of exceedingly excessive force, vile excrescences, constant cultural clashes, scatological salvoes and sheer unadulterated graphic carnage can be seen a never-ending Darwinian struggle of witty license and disgraceful debauchery.

The only truly gratuitous thing however would be a complete listing of strips and gags contained herein, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t especially recommend ‘Loady McGee & Sinus O’Gynus in the Whorehouse of Dr. Moreau’, ‘Marshmallow & Snowflake in It’s the… Ku Klux Kuties’, ‘My Dad Went to a Concentration Camp and it Was Okay’, ‘1976’, ‘Sherlock McRape in Who Hit Nelly in the Belly With Jelly?’ or ‘Boobs Pooter’s Joke-Pocalypse’ …every one an unforgettably disgusting laugh-riot…

Also included in a special full colour section are the 28 brilliantly imaginative front & back covers as well as all the contentious and wonderful letters pages from the magazine’s run to complete your shock-jock flavoured enjoyment…

This is a brutally macabre yet beguiling, loathsomely intriguing miracle of cartoon exuberance; appalling, dismaying, cathartic and horridly, blackly humorous – always forcing the reader to think and challenge their own preconceptions.

Resplendent, triumphant juvenilia and selfish self-interest have been adroitly catapulted beyond all ethical limits into the darkest depths of absurdist comedy. This is a non-stop rollercoaster of brain-blistering profound profanity; pictorial purgatory at its most gorge-rising and compelling.

Not for kids, the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, here is extreme cartooning at its most visceral and pure. Gross, vulgar, shocking strips and panel gags about sex, defecation, bodily functions (particularly the many types of farting), feminine hygiene – and men’s lack of same – comics, toys, knob-gags and even the ultimate modern taboos of religion, politics, race and child abuse are all here and waiting to get you…

And now that we’ve placated the intellectual/moral imperative inside us all, I’ll also affirm that this titanic tome is another, all-out, over the top, indisputably hilarious hoot. Buy it and see if you’re broad-minded, fundamentally honest and purely in need of ultra-adult silliness. If you aren’t any of those things but could stand a good, hearty laugh that might also make you think, then this is also the dirty cartoon joke-book for you.
All contents © 2015 Johnny Ryan (except where it isn’t). This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books Inc.

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Johnny Nemo


By Brett Ewins, Peter Milligan and friends (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-070-2

In the mid 1980s a creative explosion in British comics saw many groundbreaking new titles and a darkly cynical cultural flowering and renaissance in established titles. Many emergent writers and artists achieved prominence and a goodly few were promptly poached by America, forming what was called a “British Invasion”.

One team that crossed the pond in 1985 was Pete Milligan & Brett Ewins – already firm favourites with 2000AD readers – and for Eclipse Comics they created a darkly nihilistic post-punk private eye in alternative anthology Strange Days.

A year later the stylishly murderous maniac returned in Johnny Nemo Magazine for further far-future mayhem. He then dropped out of sight until Ewins co-opted the P.I.’s caseload and added some original exploits for the first year of indie British start-up Deadline Magazine – a seminal publishing landmark combining comics, pop culture, style, music and fashion he had created with fellow artist Steve Dillon.

Gloriously free of specious character development, Johnny Nemo remained who he always was: a murderous, devious, occasionally self-loathing London lad making a living from his only gifts.

He’s an over-sexed, avaricious, nosy, introverted, philosophical, existentialist thug. He’s also a problem-solver for hire and he lives in the future, which is not so different from now…

Following a fondly reminiscent ‘Introduction by Peter Milligan’ and ‘You’re Bastards. All of You. You’re All Bastards.’ – a heartfelt missive from the moody merc himself as seen in the 2002 collection Johnny Nemo: Existentialist Hitman of the Future – this sturdily resplendent hardcover compilation commences with ‘The Good, the Bad and the Nemo’ wherein the toughest ‘tec in 2991’s New London town is commissioned to investigate Father Burgess’ Orphanage.

The old institution – which once had the displeasure of young Johnny’s company after his parents’ last nervous breakdowns – is run by nuns and they’ve started exploding for no good reason. A seasoned riddle-solver, Johnny knows just who to smack around and soon discovers the incredible reason for the campaign of carnage before smoking out the habitual assassin…

Having made a lot of enemies, Nemo is always prepared for assassination attempts but nothing like the TeleInfo mind-mine which implants thousands of years of rational meanderings and philosophical cant in his usually indecision-free bonce. The measures taken to free-up his brain long enough to terminate his insidious attacker in ‘Cogito, Ergo Buggered’ are both shocking and shockingly effective…

Punishing puns and hyper-absurdism inform the strange case of ‘The White Quiffs of Dover’ after Nemo is hired to ferry a box containing the left testicle of Bing Crosby to an occultist. The potent eldritch artefact is also highly prized by a cult of albino Teddy Boys who will stop at nothing to obtain the treasured totem and unleash the uncanny crooner’s diabolical transmutative force.

However neither they nor the satanic singer pent inside the box have reckoned on Johnny’s innate ability to fight dirty…

Chronologically adrift, the 3 chapters of ‘The Orb of Harmony’ were first seen in the aforementioned Strange Days (from November 1984 to April 1985) and introduced Nemo and his robot secretary/sex-toy/therapist Kalina in a time-twisting tale which saw the enquiry agent hired by the government to recover an alien artefact before its loss sparked an interplanetary incident and intergalactic war.

It wasn’t hard to find the culprits in the jingoistically xenophobic League of Adam, but as they had already disposed of the Orb, the solution and return to status quo (involving the conquest of Earth, an invasion by Sirian slugmen and vast amounts of bloody violence) took a lot of planning and quite a bit of time…

From 1988 ‘The Immaculate Misconception’ is still a marvellously outrageous and controversial yarn as notoriously shag-happy Nemo is hired to protect the virginity of haughty alien hottie Princess Dania.

The demure deb is getting married in the morning and needs to be virgo intacta – something she is determined to avoid at all costs. Set on one last party she is nonetheless stuck with Johnny but calmly convinced that her looks and otherworldly pheromone arsenal will result in some serious, wedding-ending deflowering: if not from Nemo then one of his friends or enemies…

Of course Princess Da has neglected to mention the inescapable biological consequences of a night of illicit bliss with her…

Steve Dillon illustrated the clever case of murder-for-hire which saw media mogul Merdock Ridley contract Johnny to end his mega-rich life. Instantly suspicious, the lethally likely lad did some checking and discovered the job was a ploy on the gazillionaire’s part to cheat his trophy wife Fatima.

However since the trick involved freezing the assets along with the stiff (both to be revived at some time in the future) Nemo and ‘Lady Lucre’ put their heads – and sundry other body parts – together and came up with another option…

Whilst most of this book is in stark black-&-white, the three tales from Johnny Nemo Magazine are re-presented in strident full colour and ‘New London Pride’ (issue #3, February 1986 by Milligan, Ewins & Dillon) sees the hardboiled gumshoe troubled by uncharacteristic bad dreams. To gain a firm grip on himself he decides to go walkabout in the very dangerous gutters of miles-high New London City and vent some spleen against the vile and arrogant skinheads who infest the depths…

‘The Spice of Death’ – an all-Ewins art-fest – was a 2-part tale from Johnny Nemo Magazine #1 and 2 (September and November 1985) which detailed an old-fashioned tale of revenge as grieving Liza Creeture hired the man and his guns to find the killers of her brother.

The trail led to a bunch of rich-kids who hunted the poor for sport, desert metropolis Cairo and a gang of death-junkies who got high on extracted psychic auras of people who died in agony…

As the case proceeded and the bodies piled up, even Nemo began to smell a rat and suspect a cunning trap was in play…

Moving back into monochrome ‘The Hand of God’ then sees the independent trader blackmailed by bent coppers Flask and Stuff into taking out the returned messiah Jesus Christ, leading to the strangest confrontation in future history. However the Son of God is a wily sod and has a trick or two up his sleeve…

This turbulent, irreverent tome terminates with a stunning jam session as ‘New Tales of New London’ offers strip sessions by Rufus Dayglo, Ewins, Jock and Ashley Wood illustrating a sordid shift as Johnny – deflated by recent election results – indulges in introspection and tries out a few alternate personalities in ‘The Make Over’.

Still and all, whether a frou-frou interior designer, a sports hooligan, a laid-back loafer or a depressed down-and out, Johnny Nemo is still a man you don’t want to tick off…

Raucous, vulgar, excessively violent, politically incorrect and powerfully socially conscious, this superbly entertaining catalogue of chronal contretemps and spatial sorties is as potent and powerful as ever and today’s generation of toadies and Brit-fops should make certain they read, absorb and react accordingly…
Johnny Nemo is ™ and © 2014 Peter Milligan & Brett Ewins. All rights reserved.

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Solid State Tank Girl


By Alan Martin & Warwick Johnson-Cadwell (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-003-0

Comics have grown up since I was a kid. On one hand they’ve bloomed, adopting and encompassing serious attitudes whilst challenging social issues to become a literary arena as potent and valid as any other art form. And then there are those that boldly celebrate irrepressible vulgarity, inspirational rudeness, intoxicating visual bravura, incorrigible invention and sheer raucous daft fun, sort of like TISWAS for the Soul…

I’m going to say a few things about Solid State Tank Girl and let you guess which kind this book is…

Once upon a time upstarty art-students Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin (and, tangentially, Phillip Bond) prowled the convention circuit impressing the hell out of everybody with their photocopied fanzine Atomtan. At the back of issue #1 was a pin-up/ad for a dubious looking young lady with a big, Big, BIG gun and her own armoured transport. Things happened. Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon commissioned a redeveloped version for their forthcoming publishing venture Deadline (a pop-culture magazine with loads of cool comics strips): the absurdist tales of a feisty, thoroughly well-armed bad-ass chick roaming the wilds of a futuristic Australia with her Kangaroo boy-friend Booga which caught the imagination of a large portion of the public and the zeitgeist of the times. Tank Girl got massive. There was even a movie…

Collecting the miniseries from 2013, this gloriously surreal full-colour hardback is one of the books spotlighted in Titan Comics’ Best of British Month and another explosively unforgettable annal in the chequered history of a true icon of Empire and decidedly dubious darling of the comics Commonwealth…

Expressively scripted by Alan C. Martin and astoundingly illustrated by the amazing Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, the story starts with the gun-gal and her marsupial man popping into an on-its-uppers radio shop in search of advice and trinkets for Booga’s Ham Radio kit and walking into a trap unlike any other…

Before long kangaroo-boy is in a coma and Tank Girl, Jet Girl and Barney are taking a Fantastic Voyage (with all the inherent and leftover pop culture mod cons) around his (extremely) nervous system, intent on destroying the brain clot slowly killing the clot in question.

It all goes tragically wrong though and soon instead of charting the cerebellum the trio of chaotic cussing kanganauts are helplessly ‘Circumnavigating Booga’s Left Bollock’…

What they find there is a microscopic but rapidly gestating little infant whom they quite naturally pluck from its ghastly environment and return to the relative safety of the good ship and sausage-shaped submersible Significant Triode…

Once aboard the vessel the pretty pink foetus proves far from normal as ‘Three Ladies, a Kangaroo & a Little Baby’ quickly descends from charming comedy pastiche into a hairy horror story as the rush to fix Booga’s brain blockage introduces the team to deadly ghosts, involves them in a mad dash to get out of the patient before they all regain their normal sizes and inculcates a worthy yet impossible resolution not to swear in front of the nipper…

Mission improbably accomplished, the girls and more-confused-than-ever Booga can only watch in shock and terror as their wee newcomer swiftly mutates into an unstoppable, super-powered evil antithesis… an Anti-Tank Girl…

The Big Pink She-Beast’s initial attack in ‘Awesome Wells’ almost ends our unsavoury heroine’s life and only Booga’s natural tendency to react with excessive violence and extraordinary ordinance drives the still-growing invader off.

As her friends fall back to a secret fortress and try to revive her, Tank Girl’s consciousness is visiting a very strange and hippie place, gleaning impenetrable clues on how to end the evil nemesis crisis…

She returns to the physical world just in time for a showdown with Anti-Tank Girl and a hastily gathered if rather sub-par gang consisting of Anti-Barney, Anti Booga and Auntie Jet Girl…

Soon cataclysmic final battle is joined in ‘Flippin’ ‘Eck Benny’ but even after the good guys somehow triumph there’s still the little matter of dealing with the sad little anonymous evil genius who crafted the whole plot. Luckily Tank Girl’s brief sojourn in La-La Land has pointed her subconscious in the right direction…

Bizarre, manically hilarious and crammed with captivating cartoon-violence, Solid State is an unashamedly riotous romp which comes with a brace of mini extras, beginning with a typically restrained exercise in bludgeoning ballistic ballet entitled ‘Make Them All Die’, after which a quiet moment spring-cleaning the tank goes messily awry in ‘The Girl That Cleansed Our Souls’.

Also included are a half-dozen motivational poem/poster pics, a cover gallery, sketch/artwork pages and an Afterword from the Anti-Alan…

Wild, weird, endlessly re-inventive and spectacularly silly, this an ever-so-cool rollercoaster thrill-ride and lifestyle touchstone for life’s incurable rebels and undying Rude Britannians, so if you’ve never seen the anarchic, surreal and culturally soused peculiarity that is Tank Girl, bastard love child of 2000 AD and Love and Rockets, you’ve missed a truly unique experience… and remember, she doesn’t care if you like her, just so long as you notice her…
Tank Girl and all related characters are ™ & © 2013 Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. All rights reserved.

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The Chronicles of Legion volume 3: Blood Brothers


By Fabien Nury, Mario Alberti, Zhang Xiaoyu & Tirso translated by Virgine Selavy (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-095-5

The epic war between immortal sanguinite siblings rumbles on in the third translated volume of Fabien (Once Upon a Time in France, I Am Legion) Nury’s inspired reinvigoration of the Dracula legend, with Mario Alberti, Zhang Xiaoyu and Tirso Cons each illustrating a discrete epoch in the centuries-spanning and intertwined vendetta.

The accursed clash of wills began in 2011 as Les Chroniques de Legion: a generational saga which put a new spin on the monster-myth, and Blood Brothers further unravels a triptych of mysteries…

What You Need to Know: Vlad Tepes Dracula and his brother Radu possess the power to extend their lives beyond apparent death. Their consciousnesses are carried in their blood and by transferring the gory gruel to other creatures – human or not – they can possess and dominate any number of victims infinitely, carrying their minds and their motivations forever onward into infinity.

Both have lived for centuries and for all those interminable years they have despised each other…

In this tensely suspenseful third volume some hint of what caused their enhanced states of being and eternal enmity is at last revealed as their story continues to unfold across three very varied theatres of war and through very different aspects of their inhumanity…

The tale resumes in 1812 where Transylvanian snows conceal the many creatures which are Radu as they collectively await the next move of the Napoleonic deserters lured to this frozen wasteland by dreams of finding Dracula’s lost treasure.

The teller of those tales was Captain Armand Malachi who led his battle-hardened comrades Kholya, Stern, Hartmann and Feraud to the Wallachian Mountains before dying in battle against a band of Cossacks.

At least that’s the way they all saw it. Vlad, riding Malachi, found it expedient to fall down when “killed” but now, with his host form actually ceasing to function in the crippling cold, the eternal warrior is forced to transfer his accommodations to something more welcoming.

When he catches up to his former friends, however, their understandable reaction leads to more violence and in the end only poor Kholya remains of any real use…

Half a world away and back in 1521, Gabriella, Doña Del La Fuente, bearing a scarlet sigil which marks all the blood-possessed, stoically endures the vigorous dynastic intentions of future husband Hernan Torres. She had travelled to the New World to be his socially acceptable, church-sanctioned brood-mare but has become far more interested in the Conquistador’s mulatto bastard Martin.

Gabriella’s empire-building is not only imperilled by her treacherous body’s needs but also by the impossibly powerful and indefatigably hostile natives who all carry the taint and preternatural vitality of brother Radu…

When the Indians at last mount a full attack on the half-constructed Torres compound, the Europeans barely repel the assault and then only at the cost of the Doña’s faithful, steadfast and mystically augmented bodyguard Carlos whom she impetuously sacrifices to preserve Martin…

In the gory aftermath the bastard son realises what she is and what she’s done, but when they foolishly consummate their overwhelming passion, the constantly spying priests of the Inquisition make their own move. They are of course, no match for the powers of a Dracula…

Soon Hernan is gone too and Gabriella turns her attentions to making the New World her own. All that remains to bar her progress is the firmly embedded Radu…

In 1887 London is the centre of the world and formerly impoverished scoundrel Victor Douglas Thorpe relishes his return to it even as the latest embodiment of Dracula. The new Lord Cavendish soon takes his place amongst the aristocracy of the Athenaeum Club but cannot escape their haughty disapproval and even outright hostility.

No one knows why the immensely wealthy old oligarch settled his title and the largest fortune in the Empire upon such a blatant parvenu blackguard, but they all have their suspicions…

When Chief Superintendent Warren of Scotland Yard and solicitor Mr. Morris Webster attempt to extort the new Lord with a fabrication of supposition and innuendo they are unaware that they are challenging a sadistic absolute monarch carrying centuries of experience in removing threats to his security, but his summary treatment of them is as nothing to the way the next chancer is dealt with…

Soon afterwards the holder of Thorpe’s old gambling debts attempts to reassert his old hold on the former addict and foolishly uses Esther Harrington as leverage.

When he was human Thorpe had left her pregnant and penniless without a second thought but the new Lord Cavendish is more concerned about making a statement than any sum of money and before long the grimy streets of Whitechapel first run red with his all-encompassing vengeance and then explosively burn in a furious storm of purging flame.

Afterwards Cavendish cannot really explain why he let Esther live or why he set her up with a fortune and a new life in India…

And in the cold snows of a dark night gypsies gather around a campfire where an old man tells the story of two brothers who were held hostage by the Ottoman Sultan to keep their lordly father compliant.

The boys dealt with enforced captivity in different ways. Tough, rebellious Vlad bided his time and nursed his hatred whilst his softer, weaker sibling Radu quickly capitulated, becoming a favourite plaything of the Sultan.

One day an aged pilgrim came to court carrying a box with two scorpions in it and Vlad discovered the means to fulfil all his dreams, but at such an incredible, eternal cost…

To Be Concluded…

Bleak, thrilling and sumptuously sinister, this latest instalment is couched, as ever, in a luxurious oversized (211 x 282 mm) full-colour hardback: offering a superbly illustrated and beguiling told, intoxicating mosaic of macabre menace which is a stunning and ambitious treat for all fans of fang and fear…

Les Chroniques de Legion and all contents © Éditions Glénat 2012. Translated edition © Titan Comics, 2015

The Chronicles of Legion volume 3: Blood Brothers will be released on May 5th 2015 and is available for pre-order now.