Category: Mature Reading

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The Initiates – A Comic Artist And a Wine Artisan Exchange Jobs

Initiates front 2
By Étienne Davodeau, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-703-4

Throughout 2010 Bande Dessinée author/artist Étienne Davodeau (Friends of Saltiel, Lulu femme Nue, Un monde si tranquille, The Poor People: A History of Activists), noted for both brilliant fiction and moving factual comicbook novels, participated in a fascinating life (or perhaps vocation) swap experiment.

The artist, writer and designer 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 Le Grand, AKA “Joub”. His first album The Man Who Did Not Like Trees was released in 1992 and he forms an integral part of the modern graphic auteur movement in French and Belgian comics.

Released as Les Ignorants in October 2011, this lyrical and beguiling cartoon documentary reveals the year when the artist and independent specialist wine-maker Richard Leroy shared the secrets and mundane realities of each other’s insular, introspective and fearsomely philosophical solitary professions.

Davodeau knew absolutely nothing of the ferocious demands of the elite, experimental grape-growing game nor the oenophilic secrets and mysteries of tasting wine, but similarly the bluff, irascible son of the soil had barely read a comic in his entire life. The journal of discovery opens with ‘To Pruning, Then (Plus One Belgian Printing)’ as the artist is put to work in icy winds on the terroir of Montbenault, cutting and shaping the lianas which hold such glorious potential. Then Leroy is taken on an eye-opening tour of a Belgian print-works where Davodeau is summoned to sign off his latest album…

In ‘Wood’ a trip to a cooperage dissects the role of barrels in the slow fermentation process, as the new friends discuss the imponderables of judgement. It’s hard to define, but in their own fields each knows right and wrong, good and bad and most especially “not perfect yet”…

Leroy’s extra-curricular work includes reading lots of comics and graphic novels, as well as being introduced to the peripheral joys such as signings, collectors fads and so forth, but when he is introduced to major creator Gibrat a fascinating discourse on the aesthetics of the medium ensues in ‘Jean-Pierre (and Jimi, and Wolfgang Amadeus and a Few Others)’, liberally lubricated by the vintner’s ever-present samples of his own form of creative expression…

A charming interview and guest appearance with Lewis Trondheim graces ‘The Art of the Portrait and its Vicissitudes, or “The Theory of the Beak”’ even as the spring brings terror, confusion and greater back-breaking toil as the artist has his first brush with tractors and even more obscure specialist technologies, ‘What Goes Without Saying’ offers personal history and raking in the hot sun, after which ‘In Praise of Manure’ focuses on subjectivity as he learns the pros and cons of the controversial vintners’ heresy of “Biodynamics”…

Ploughing and accidental self-immolation features in ‘A Question of Proximity’, whilst the arrival of the world’s most influential wine critic opens a whole new area of discourse in ‘New York/Montbenault/New York’, and the tables are satisfactorily turned in ‘Saying Something Stupid: (Sometimes) a Good Idea’ as Richard attends an editors’ meeting in Paris in July before a little break at a Bistro reveals the true depth of the naïve comic-consuming artisan’s liquid gifts…

Wine-making is a 24/7 occupation and as storm season hits the terroir ‘The Blunder’ offers moments of genuine tension and apprehension for this year’s crop before a successful “disbudding” of the vines leaves time for a taste-training session for the novice drinker and reluctant reader alike.

In ‘Blacks and Whites’ the never-shy Leroy meets a creator whose work deeply affected him, and the pleasant hours spent with author/artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu lead to deep thoughts all round before ‘Wherein, When Certain Vintners Suffer Sulphur’ covers the raging debate in the wine industry on the use of elemental additives to “manage” fermentation, which leads inevitably to the frantic camaraderie of the grape-picking and constant cry for another ‘Bucket!’

October, and with the year’s harvest pressed and in barrels there’re a few quiet moments to disparage foolish ‘Label Drinkers’ at Wine Exhibitions, happily contrasting the snobs with Leroy’s first experience of a Comics Festival, before November brings the first tentative tastings of the new vintage and a long-awaited epiphany moment for reluctant reader Leroy in ‘Montbenault/Paris/Kabul’…

The Photographer (“Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders”, by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier ) was the book the vintner responded to on a purely, frighteningly visceral level, so Davodeau takes the bemused convert to meet the lead creator and consequently discovers a tenuous connection between his life-swap partner and the documentary graphic novel’s subjects…

In ‘A Teetering Statue’ the quiet winter weeks allow breathing space to learn the travails of shipping and export, as well as encompassing a visit to the Paris Cartier Foundation’s Moebius Exhibition and some deliciously piquant home truths for comics cognoscenti before returning again to pruning vines, whilst ‘Savagnins, Poulsards, and Company’ takes us almost full circle as Leroy takes the artist to the vintner’s own personal promised land and a fellow elite wine maverick, whilst a trip to Corsica takes in the Bastia Comics Convention and the unique vineyard of the “Patrimonio Arena” in ‘Nielluccio, Vermentinu, Bianco Gentile and Oubapo’…

The magnificently elegiac and languorously evocative account wraps up in genteelly seductive manner with one final excursion as The Initiates head for the Dordogne to follow up on Emmanuel Guibert’s introduction to the survivors of The Photographer. One last gracious day of cross-fertilised booze and books conversation in ‘Final Revelations under a Cherry Tree‘ then leads inevitably back to where and how it all began for both participants…

Of course all I care about is comics, but even on my terms this rapturous, studious yet impossibly addictive account of two open-minded, deeply dedicated artists’ tentative exploration of each other worlds – at once tediously familiar and utterly unknown – is a masterpiece of subtle education, if not benevolent propaganda and, like good wine or a great book, takes its own sweet time to hook you.

Also included in this surprisingly compelling hardback chronicle is ‘Drunk/Read’ – a list of wines and graphic novels introduced to each novitiate; an intriguing bucket list for readers to aspire to and complete our second hand education into the greatest arts on Earth…

This dazzling display of harsh fact and the theosophical fervour of the grape-growers art, seamlessly blended with an outsider’s overview of our whacky, cosy world of cartoons and funnybooks, is enchanting beyond measure and should figure high on any fan’s list of books to seduce comics non-believers with. It might also be the perfect gift for all those people you thought you couldn’t buy a graphic novel present for…

Europeans excel at making superb comics which simultaneously entertain and educate (check out the sublime On the Odd Hours or The Sky over the Louvre to see what I mean) and the seductive, evocative, eclectically human monochrome illustration and dialogue perfectly capture the sensorial effect of wine and work and weather, and the backbreaking, self-inflicted artisan toil and ineffable rewards of making comics or creating wine…

Every so often a book jumps our self-imposed ghetto wall of power fantasies and rampaging adventurism, and I pray this elegiac documentary of a bizarrely fitting experiment makes that sort of splash in the wider world.
© Futuropolis 2011. © 2013 NBM for English translation.

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A Treasury of Victorian Murder Compendium


By Rick Geary (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-704-1

Master cartoon criminologist Rick Geary has been sifting through humanity’s dark drives for years: researching and presenting a compelling cavalcade of corruption with his series of graphic novel/true-murder mystery reconstructions, each beguilingly combining a superlative talent for laconic prose, incisive observation and forensically detailed pictorial extrapolation with his formidable fascination for the darker aspects of human history.

Geary’s unblinking eye has of late been examining the last hundred years or so in his Treasury of XXth Century Murder series, but first began his graphic assignations with Mankind’s darker aspects in a delicious anthologised tome entitled A Treasury of Victorian Murder in 1987. Now that initial volume and three of the eight that succeeded it (Jack the Ripper from 1995, The Fatal Bullet from1999, and 2003’s The Beast of Chicago) have all been re-issued in a splendid morbidly monochrome deluxe hardback – because, after all, bloody murder is always a black and white affair…

Geary’s fascination with his subject is irresistibly infectious and his unique cartooning style a perfect medium to convey the starkly factual narrative in a memorable, mordant and undeniably enjoyable manner.

The basic premise is simple. The feel and folklore of Queen Victoria’s evocative era is irredeemably ingrained in the psyche of the contemporary world, and that first flourishing of social modernity invested crime and especially murder with a whole new style and morbid appeal to the general public. Each of the cases the author adapts was big news at a time when burgeoning technologies, rising literacy levels and crass populism first began to stoke the fires of an insatiable hunger for gory news. Moreover, many of the cases still resonate with today’s catalogue of atrocities and will stir familiar feelings in readers of a later century – especially the unsolved ones.

The eponymous first volume begins with a stunning background feature depicting ‘Celebrated Events of the Victorian Age’, ‘Illustrious Personages’, ‘Statesmen, Explorers and Innovators’, stars of ‘Literature and the Arts’ and naturally many of the most notorious ‘Murders and Murderesses’ before setting the scene and tone with compelling illustrations of ‘Picadilly Circus, London 1887’ and a dissertation on the Victorians’ obsession with death.

Following the text page ‘Introductory Remarks to the First Three Murders and Bibliography’ the still-unsolved case known as ‘The Ryan Mystery’ is diligently laid out, wherein a brother and sister were brutally slain in Lower Manhattan in 1873, after which ‘The Crimes of Dr. E.W. Pritchard’ outlines the deadly narcissism and fraudulent career and just deserts (the last man to be publicly executed in Scotland) of a very nasty physician who outraged sensibilities with a campaign of genteel slaughter in 1865 Glasgow, before concluding with an early fully-documented account of that now-common miscreant, the child-killer in the salutary tale of ‘The Abominable Mrs. Pearcy’, whose atrocities in Hampstead, Hertfordshire dumbfounded the Empire in 1890…

Geary chose a novel methodology for the next, book-length saga – presumably because the case has been the subject of so much investigation and bowdlerisation over the years.

Jack the Ripper – a Journal of the Whitechapel Murders 1888 -1889 is “compiled from the journals of an unknown British Gentleman… who closely followed the increasingly savage killings” and wittily narrates a day by day account of the horror that stalked Whitechapel and gripped the world as it became the first media-led, press-fed cause célèbre.

Following a comprehensive map of ‘Whitechapel and the Crimes of Jack the Ripper, 1888‘, Geary – producing some of the most moodily inspired art of his prodigious career – unravels, reworks and remixes all the myths, facts and exploitative stunts of assorted participants. Also included are some potential early murders missed by the police and possible copy-cat crimes from that frenzied period of London life, in a truly captivating take on the most famous murder-mystery in history.

With an Introduction and full Bibliography this graphic exposé is still one of most engaging of expeditions into the legend of Saucy Jack…

If the Ripper has moved far beyond the realm of cold, hard plain facts, the next tale is its very antithesis: a phenomenally well-documented and demystified political assassination that allows the wryly witty Geary to fully exploit his ironically charged talents…

The Fatal Bullet – a True Account of the Assassination, Lingering Pain, Death and Burial of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States begins with a simple comparison of ‘The Two Roads’ which led the politician and his killer Charles J. Guiteau to their respective fates, before ‘The Journey Home’ begins the sorry tale with the interment of the nation’s lost leader.

From there the story harks back and simultaneously examines both participants’ oddly ‘Parallel Lives’, tracing their different responses to their nation’s call during the War Between the States whilst in ‘A Deadly Campaign’ as Garfield is literally called by duty to public office, his increasingly delusion stalker Guiteau insinuates himself into the politician’s orbit before at last shooting the great man on Saturday, July 2nd 1881.

‘The Long Summer’ then describes the nightmarishly bizarre and appallingly prolonged death throes of the President – including many of the positively baroque remedies and solutions prescribed by a phalanx of eminent physicians and inventors, all desperately seeking to find and extract the shell lost somewhere in the fallen leader’s body…

When Garfield finally passed on September 9th all that was left was the trial of his clearly deranged killer, as remarkably recorded in ‘Conclusion: At the Bar of Justice’…

This stunning compilation then concludes with a genuinely terrifying tale of modern murder with The Beast of Chicago – an Account of the Life and Crimes of Herman W. Mudgett, known to the world as H.H. Holmes, H.M. Howard, D.T. Pratt, Harry Gordon, J.A. Judson, Edward Hatch, A.C. Hayes et al. – a jolly catalogue of criminality and carnage describing the astounding killing career of a bogus doctor and mesmerising psychopath whose official body count was twenty-seven souls, but may well have topped two hundred.

Attributed as America’s first documented serial killer, Mudgett/Holmes seemingly did it all first: a serial bigamist and conman, he hunted and slaughtered for fun and profit, lured victims to a purpose-built killing ground in the placid heart of a quiet suburb, seduced women, abducted children, corrupted and controlled entire families – making them his accomplices and even proxy killers – and, when finally caught, cultivated notoriety with an aplomb that guaranteed him a place in history…

His worst recorded atrocities took place during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; a vast trade fair in Chicago where he had constructed a unique hotel and guest house dubbed “The Holmes Castle”…

Following maps of the sites, floor plans of his Castle and the 1894 escape route that revealed ‘The Desperate Journey of H.H. Holmes’, Geary treats us to a elucidatory Prologue ‘This is Chicago!’ to set the stage , before beginning the horrific tale of woe in ‘Dr. Holmes Comes to Town’ wherein the dapper, personable medical charlatan and insurance fraudster’s early life is disclosed before he inveigles himself into a position of respectability in suburban Englewood and commences to build his dream palace…

‘The Castle’ was an incredible, insane machine designed to lure in travellers and generate missing persons, and although its unique amenities were never fully understood or its death toll confirmed, Holmes’ secondary business – selling display skeletons to medical institutions – did extremely well in the four years that it was open for business, after which time Holmes took his incredible seduction and slaughter show on the road, or rather rails, during ‘The Desperate Journey’.

With events and disappearances spiralling, Holmes made a rare mistake and was briefly imprisoned for fraud. Unable to help himself, he then cheated his cellmate – a professional train-robber – who exacted vengeance by telling the authorities the truth about his boastful bunk mate…

With only a hint of the true extent of the bogus doctor’s crimes disclosed in ‘The Castle Revealed’, Holmes remained ‘The Prisoner’ for the rest of his short life, but even incarcerated with every day bringing fresh revelations of his horrific crimes, the first American Psycho succeeded in taking hold of his story and skilfully manipulating his own legend and myth…

As ever, Geary presents facts and theories with chilling pictorial precision, captivating clarity and devastating wit, and this still broadly unresolved mystery is every bit as compelling as his other homicidal forays: a perfect example of how graphic narrative can be so much more than simple fantasy entertainment.

With the inclusion of highly informative pictorial background essays and maps throughout, this big book of death is a sublimely readable successor to that era’s “Penny-Dreadfuls”: a startling yet accessible read that will engross fans of graphic narrative and similarly entice followers of True Crime thrillers. This merrily morbid murder masterpiece should be mandatory reading for all comic lovers, mystery-addicts and crime-collectors.
© 1987-2003, 2012 Rick Geary. All Rights Reserved.

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Fear Agent: Re-Ignition


By Rick Remender & Tony Moore (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 987-1-59307-764-8

Once upon a time science fiction was hard, fast all-action wrapped in impossible ideas, but over the years films like Star Wars and TV shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica slowly ameliorated, crossbred and bastardised the form until it became simple window-dressing for cop stories and westerns and war yarns…

Rick Remender clearly loves the old-fashioned, wide-eyed wonder stuff too, and in 2005 brought back strictly impossible, mind-bending action-packed Amazing Stories to remind us all of what we’d been missing.

Fear Agent debuted from Image Comics and ran for eleven issues before folding and being subsequently picked up by Dark Horse in 2007. This slim, scintillating tome collects the introductory 4-issue story-arc which introduced dissolute, Mark Twain-spouting, alcoholic Texan freelance pest-control operative Heath Huston: the original Man With A Past But No Future…

It opens as a weary, hungry space-trucker pulls into Glentbin deep-space service station and discovers to his horror that the place is overrun with an entirely unacceptable kind of vermin, before the scene shifts to planet Frazterga where independent contractor Huston is on a bug-hunt with his mouth dry, his head screaming and his bank-account empty.

He’s climbing a really big mountain with a massive hangover and it’s real hard to make a living when the pencil-pushers of the Quintala Convention daily redefine the parameters of the Killable Alien Rating, but here in this last-ditch, last-chance filthy backwater Huston is going to make some money if it kills him.

Heath’s been hired to retrieve terraforming technology filched from colonists by the stupid, stupid ape-creatures living in the hills, but after a decidedly well-planned resistance from the hairy beasts he soon realises he’s been shafted yet again. The big dumb monkeys are using the stolen parts to build a spaceship…

After another blockbusting battle Huston discovers the burly pro-simians have been psionically enslaved by a marooned Class A entity. Officially, he should back off and leave it be, but he’s ticked, determined to get paid and has never liked aliens anyway…

The catastrophic explosion and riotous aftermath don’t go down too well with his clients either, and when he returns to his sentient spaceship Annie it’s empty-handed and with the Mayor’s blood on his gauntlets.

Down to their last wisps of fuel, the exterminator and his rather stroppy ship head for nearby Glentbin Station and the dubious hope that they can hock or trade something for fuel and food…

As they coast on fumes towards the service facility a call comes in from Thomas Yorke of the United Systems government. He wants to hire the reprobate – maybe that should be “needs to hire”…

They are old not-friends but Glentbin has gone offline and the authorities suspect some kind of infestation. If there is and Huston cleans it up there’s a 10,000 Uni-cred fee in it…

The satellite mall is empty and the legendary “too quiet”, but the smell more than makes up for it. Fearing the worst, Huston starts helping himself to supplies when he finds the ghastly remains of a patron and realises the entire place has been taken over by Feeders…

Fighting a wave of tentacles coming from everywhere, the terrified spacer blasts his way into a water pipe and is flushed into the station’s main cistern. Floating there is the only survivor of the infestation – a feisty, surly warp scientist named Mara…

She’s never seen the beasts before but Heath has. Feeders are a flesh-eating horror that were only stopped by blowing up any planet they landed on and, when his sodden new friend says they were sent to Glentbin by the Dressite Empire, Huston realises that Earth’s greatest enemy are planning on finishing the job they started decades ago: the last time they tried to wipe out mankind and legendary Fear Agents only just stopped them…

Blasting through the hull of the station, the grizzled veteran admits to being the only survivor of that august cadre of warriors, even as he and Mara spy on the station from the relative security of hard vacuum.

And that’s when he learns the Dressites have used the station to dispatch the unstoppable Feeder larvae to Earth in a convoy of deadly Trojan Horse ships…

Frantic, frustrated and unable to broadcast a warning, the Terrans bleed off cached fuel supplies into Annie – who hates Mara on sight – and try to reach Earth first. This is exactly what the Dressites want: they’ve supercharged the warp fuel and expect their old enemy to go up in a blaze of burning hell…

They have however not reckoned on the astounding intellect of the AI, who contrives to ride the explosive warp-wave and dumps the fugitives alive but lost on a strange alien world where they’re soon embroiled in an apocalyptic civil and religious war between creatures of flesh and monsters of metal. Moreover, as the campaign proceeds and Huston frets that the Feeders are inexorably closing on planet Earth, he realises that they are lost not just in space but also time…

Given a chance to save his homeworld years before any greedy marauding ETs ever attacked it, Huston embarks on a crazy raid with his fleshy allies that goes horribly, irretrievably wrong.

And then he’s killed.

To Be Continued (yes, really)…

With a copious sketchbook section from artist Tony Moore, this powerfully character-driven, fast, furious, frantic, thrilling, manic and exceedingly clever balls-to-the-wall science fiction is in the best tradition of 2000AD, and has all the adrenalin-fuelled fun any fantasy aficionado could want.

Fear Agent was a breath of fresh air when it came out and remains one of very best cosmic comics experiences around. If you’re old enough, Sentient enough and Earthling enough, this is a series you must see before you die, have your brain-engrams recorded and are cloned into a new form unable to enjoy terrific fiction feasts.
© 2006, 2007 Rick Remender & Tony Moore. All rights reserved. All characters and distinctive likenesses are ™ Rick Remender & Tony Moore.

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Madwoman of the Sacred Heart


By Jodorowsky & Moebius, translated by Natacha Ruck & Ken Grobe (Sloth Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-908830-01-2

Here’s a modern masterpiece of comics creativity at last available to English-speaking audiences, one of the most intriguing and engaging works by two creative legends of sequential narrative. To some people, this superb piece of thought provoking fiction might be shocking or blasphemous however, so if you hold strong views on sex or religion – especially Christianity – stop right now, spare yourself some outrage and come back tomorrow.

Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is a filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, comics writer, world traveller, philosopher and spiritual guru, born in Tocopilla, Chile in 1929. He is most widely known for his films Fando y Lis, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Sante Sangre, The Rainbow Thief and others, as well as his vast comics output, such as Anibal 5, (created whilst living in Mexico) Le Lama blanc, Aliot, The Meta-Barons, Borgia and more, co-created with some of South America and Europe’s greatest artists. His nigh decade-long collaboration with Moebius on the Tarot-inspired adventure  The Incal (1981-1989) completely redefined and reinvented what comics could aspire to and achieve.

Best known for his violently surreal avant-garde films, loaded with highly-charged, inspird imagery blending mysticism and “religious provocation” and his spiritually informed fantasy and science fiction comics, Jodorowsky is also fascinated by the inner realms and has devised his own doctrine of therapeutic healing: Psychomagic, Psychogenealogy and Initiatic massage. He still remains fully engaged and active in all these creative areas today.

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was born in the suburbs of Paris in 1938 and raised by his grandparents. In 1955 he attended the Institut des Arts Appliqués where he became friends with Jean-Claude Mézières who, at 17, was already selling strips and illustrations to magazines such as Coeurs Valliants, Fripounet et Marisette and Spirou. Giraud apparently spent most of his time drawing cowboy comics and left after a year.

In 1956 he travelled to Mexico, staying with his mother for eight months, before returning to France and a full-time career in comics, mostly westerns such as Frank et Jeremie for Far West and King of the Buffalo, A Giant with the Hurons and others for Coeurs Valliants in a style based on French comics legend Joseph “Jijé” Gillain.

Giraud spent his National Service in Algeria in 1959-1960, where he worked on military service magazine 5/5 Forces Françaises and, on returning to civilian life, became Jijé’s assistant in 1961, working on the master’s long-running (1954-1977) Western epic Jerry Spring. A year later, Giraud and Belgian writer Jean-Michel Charlier launched the serial ‘Fort Navajo’ in Pilote #210, and soon its disreputable, anti-hero lead character Lieutenant Blueberry became one of the most popular European strips of modern times. In 1963-1964, Giraud produced strips for satire periodical Hara-Kiri and, keen to distinguish and separate this material from his serious day job, first coined his pen-name “Moebius”.

He didn’t use it again until 1975 when he joined Bernard Farkas, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Philippe Druillet – all rabid science fiction fans – to become the founders of a revolution in narrative graphic arts as “Les Humanoides Associes”. Their groundbreaking adult fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant utterly enraptured the comics-buying public and Giraud again wanted to utilise a discrete creative persona for the lyrical, experimental, soul-searching material he was producing: series such as The Airtight Garage, The Incal (with Alejandro Jodorosky) and the mystical, dream-world flights of sheer fantasy contained in Arzach…

To further separate his creative bipolarity, Giraud worked inks with a brush whilst the futurist Moebius rendered with pens. Both of him passed away on March 10th 2012.

Jodorowsky and Moebius’ second groundbreaking co-creation was originally released in three albums from Les Humanoïdes Associés as La Folle du Sacré CÅ“ur (1992), Le Piège de l’irrationnel (1993) and Le Fou de la Sorbonne (1998) before the saga was collected into one massive, ecstatic and revolutionary volume in 2004.

The company’s American arm Humanoids, Inc. translated it into English in 2006, which forms the basis for this comprehensive new edition from fledgling British publisher Sloth Comics.

Professor Alan Mangel is a world-renowned aesthete, deep thinker and chief lecturer at the celebrated Sorbonne. As such he is the focus of much student attention – particularly female – but none as fervent as that of the insular, fanatically bible-bashing Christian and deeply disturbed Elisabeth.

When the teacher’s shrewish wife Myra denounces, shames and impoverishes him at the moment of his greatest triumph, the arrogantly cerebral, proudly austere, violently chaste and determinedly sexually abstinent Mangel loses the awed respect of his once doting students and disciples who shun his once overcrowded classes and even mock and assault him.

Only Elisabeth remains devoted to him but she has designs both carnal and divine on the aging, flabby, secular, lapsed and born-again Jew. To make matters worse, when she throws herself at him and is repulsed, this awakens the philosopher’s own lustful youthful libido which takes form as a gadfly ghost constantly urging him to indulge in acts of vile debauchery and rampant lust.

Eventually the pressure is too great and Mangel agrees to meet Elisabeth at the Church of the Sacred Heart. The journey there is awful: even the universe seems set against him as rude taxi-drivers, a mad old lady tramp and even dogs further humiliate the broken old man.

In the holiest part of the church Elisabeth again attempts to seduce the long sterile and wilfully impotent Alan, explaining that her researches have revealed him to be the biblical Zacharias reborn, destined to impregnate her with a son: the Prophet John who would in turn herald the rebirth of Jesus…

Again the rational scientist baulks at her words but Elisabeth promises a miracle and when Mangel’s horny, ghostly other self “possesses” him the dotard loses control and finally gives the mad girl what she’s been begging for…

Plagued with shame and remorse, still tormented by his inner letch and broke, Mangel resumes lecturing and slowly rebuilds his reputation until one day Elisabeth returns, her nude body declaring her to be forever the property of Alan Zacharias Mangel. She is three months pregnant with the sterile man’s baby and has already recruited the St. Joseph who will help them fulfil their sacred mission…

The divinely-dispatched protector, a drug addict and petty criminal previously called Muhammad, already has a line on The Mary: she’s his girlfriend Rosaura, currently imprisoned in a secure mental hospital. She’s also in a coma…

Dragged against the will he no longer seems capable of exerting, Mangel experiences his latest ongoing tribulation when St. Joseph breaks The Mary out with the aid of a gun and his distressed guts give way to what will be, for all of the chosen ones, an uncomfortable and prolonged period of stress-related explosive diarrhoea…

Against all his rational protests and worries, things just seem to keep falling into place for the pilgrims. Rosura is no longer comatose, and they get away without a single problem – if you don’t count the olfactory punishment the Professor’s rebellious innards are repeatedly inflicting upon them all…

“Mary” is the most ravishing creature he has ever seen, but as crazy as her friends. When she cavorts naked in a field during a midnight thunderstorm, frantically imploring God to impregnate her with the second Jesus, Mangel’s lustful ghost again overtakes him and he surreptitiously copulates with the wildly bucking lascivious loon…

The next day reality hits hard when he reads of two nurses executed when the comatose daughter of an infamous Columbian drug baron was abducted from a certain institution…

The second chapter opens with the four fugitives hiding out in a lavish seaside house and Mangel – as always – arguing with both his priapic phantom and rationalist conscience. His so impossibly, imperturbably, persuasive companions are untroubled: they are simply passing the days until the birth of John the Baptist and the Second Coming of Christ…

The next crisis is pecuniary as the lavish spending of the trio soon exhausts the Professor’s funds and they are reduced to their last 100 franc note…

Elisabeth is unconcerned and simply places a bet with it. Operating under divine guidance the horse race wins the quartet three and half million Francs, but before the reeling rationalist can grasp that, there’s another insane development as Mary/Rosaura declares herself to be the Androgynous Christ – both male and female – reborn and made manifest to save us all.

She still looks devastatingly all-woman however, and when she kisses the old fool and sends him back to the Church of the Sacred Heart to “obtain” a vial of holy Baptismal oil, he goes despite himself, arguing all the way with his imaginary sex-obsessed younger self.

It’s another humiliating and deranged debacle. The famous house of worship is hosting an ecumenical convention of argumentative theologians of all religions and that self-same crazy woman is still there, claiming to be God and challenging them all.

After driving them away she even tries to have sex with the bewildered fallen philosopher who barely escapes with the stolen oil. The worst of it all is that, based on recent evidence, Mangel can’t even say with any certainty that the ill-smelling harridan isn’t telling the truth…

Driving back through the fleshpots of the city with his ghost tempting him every inch of the way, the weary savant is dragged back to appalling reality by a newspaper headline declaring that the police have a witness in the murder/abduction of Rosaura Molinares, daughter of the most wanted drug trafficker on Earth.

However, when the nigh-unhinged thinker reaches his sanctuary from reason, the true believers already know. They taped the TV news and show him the witness describing a completely different killer: El Perro, chief hitman of Pedro Molinares‘ Medellin Cartel…

With the last foundations of precious logic crumbling, Mangel reaches an emotional tipping point and when The Androgynous Christ demands he make love to her, the old fool submits to stress – and his ever-horny spectral alter ego – by surrendering to his lusts. Before long he is in the throes of a bizarre, eye-opening, life-altering four-way love session with all the mad people he has wronged in his head and heart…

The epiphanic moment is rather spoiled when the wall explodes and a cadre of mercenaries working for a rival cartel burst in, looking for Rosaura’s father. They’re followed by the Columbian Secret Service, also hunting the drug lord and quite prepared to kill everybody to find him.

…And they in turn are ambushed by American DEA agents who slaughter everybody in their sights in their desperation to capture Molinares’ daughter and her weirdo friends. The illegally operating Yanks drag their captives to a submarine waiting offshore just as French police hit the beach and El Perro attacks the sub, spectacularly rescuing the quartet and transporting them to safety by helicopter and cargo plane…

The concluding chapter opens with all of France astonished by the kidnapping of its most beloved thinker, even as in a Columbian Garden of Eden a newly-enlightened and happy Mangel and his heavily pregnant Elisabeth prepare for the birth of The Child.

The Androgynous Christ too has changed and grown, easily converting the hard-bitten drug gangsters into a holy army of believers in the redeemer Jesusa…

Top dog Pedro Molinares is dying from cancer and his devoted army are fully, fanatically in tune with Jesusa’s plans, especially after an impossible blood miracle seemingly proves their new leader’s earthbound divinity. Equally astounded, Mangel too reaches a spiritual crisis as he accompanies Elisabeth deep into the jungle to give birth.

Mangel’s journey and ultimate transformation at the hands of rainforest shaman Doña Paz then lead to even more astonishing revelations, changes and shocks that I’m just not prepared to spoil for you…

Controversial, shocking, challenging, fanciful, enchanting and incredibly funny, this a book you must read and will always remember.
™ Les Humanoïdes Associés, SAS, Paris. English version © 2011 Humanoids, Inc., Los Angeles. All rights reserved.

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Agent Gates and the Secret Adventures of Devonton Abbey (a Parody)


By Camaren Subhiyah & Kyle Hilton (Andrews McMeel Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-4494-3434-2

Parody has been a major staple of the comics and cartooning world ever since the days of Hogarth and Cruickshank, so it’s marvellous to see that our colonial cousins are keeping the home fires burning in this sublimely over the top tribute to blockbuster British Television export Downton Abbey, which mingles devastatingly wry observation with outrageously surreal exaggeration to top-hole effect.

I’m not actually a follower or fan of the source material but I know great art and witty writing when I see it, and this supremely daft delight certainly rings both those bells…

The aristocratic Crawhill family has occupied stately Devonton Abbey for centuries and now – in April 1914 – the current Earl Richard is master of a house that consists of his unfortunately American wife Cora, wilful daughters Margaret, Cynthia and Flora. Also firmly in residence is his formidable mother the Dowager Countess Viola; an acid-tongued basilisk who knows all the family’s secrets and is the true ruler of the richly furnished and well-upholstered roost.

Below stairs, although head butler Mr. Larson runs the estate’s affairs, lamed valet and under-butler Jack Gates is also privy to much that goes on and is far more important that most realise…

With the winds of a Great War mustering on the idyllic horizon, unscrupulous German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow pays a formal visit. The filthy Boche spy and warmonger is well aware that Devonton and its façade of foppish, old-world primness and decadence conceals the clandestine HQ of the British Empire’s Secret Intelligence Service and their exotic super-powered operatives, but has not reckoned on the sheer pluck and determination of the bionic Agent Gates, nor his mysterious handler Agent Hera…

Still, all does not goes as anybody planned and the mad Hun expires before disclosing any useful intelligence. The covert operatives continue blithely on preparing for the visit of Austro-Hungarian Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, unaware that traitors and agents of the Kaiser have penetrated into the very heart of the household.

Lord Richard and Lady Cora are far more concerned with prestige, aristocratic rivalries, maintaining the proper niceties regarding their property and their deucedly useless daughters – all far too wrapped up in their silly “causes” such as animal husbandry, parties, any husbandry, marrying cousins, the estate Petting Zoo, Trousers For Women and such déclassé tosh and taradiddle – to concentrate on the things that truly matter.

Happily above and below stairs Lady Viola and Gates are on the case, ensuring the succession of Devonton and safety of the nation by bringing in new if not actually blue blood…

A touch of Bullshot Crummond, a dash of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and just a hint of Blackadder, not to mention heaping helpings of Richard Hannay and his illustrious True Brit ilk, all served up with lashings of superbly silly hijinx inform this brilliant bash at the award-winning show, with Steampunk plotlines working in perfect tandem with deliriously funny and absurdist stabs and japes involving the perfectly rendered cast of that most proper of serials.

If you love the show enough to see it successfully spoofed or just love outstanding comedy adventure this is a pictorial billet doux to a bygone era that you won’t want to miss…
© 2013 Kyle Hilton and Camaren Subhiyah. All rights reserved.

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Booyah!


By Loran, translated by FNIC (Sloth Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-908830-00-5

The Continent has long been the home of superbly crafted, challenging comics fare – unbelievable amounts of it in all manner of styles and genres – and English readers have suffered for decades due to the paucity of decent translations to our churlish mother tongue.

That’s not to say that what we have seen (especially recently with the advent of the wonderful Cinebook line of European classics) hasn’t been wonderful; it’s simply that there’s so very much we still haven’t…

Thus I’m delighted to welcome a new company into the Anglo-arena with this gloriously anarchic offering from cartoon wild-man Laurent Crenn AKA Loran and his horrifically hilarious Bouyoul, who’s jumped the Pond and had his passport stamped – in blood – as the cute and cuddly catastrophe-in-action Booyah!

Loran’s work was first seen in Anus Horibilis, working with co-founders Fred and Jean-Louis Marco, producing the shocking shenanigans of not only this effervescent, well-meaning pariah but also Captain Caca, Gringo Malo and Les Rangers de l’Espace and latterly at Atelier du Préau and Le Cycliste.

The little devil’s – Bouyoul, not Loran’s – second swing at fame is covered in this delicious initial translated collection and commence with ‘Happy Birthday’ as the well-intentioned green gargoyle hosts a celebration for the local kids, before his customary lack of fine coordination and impulse control, combined with sheer bad luck, turn the joyous anniversary into a bloodbath that is many attendees’ last…

A little old lady, her cat ‘Domino’ and Booyah’s determination to prove he’s not a monster all conspire to ruin the emerald atrocity’s day before ‘Mr. Sandman, Bring Me a Scream’ reveals a disastrous, savage and surreal encounter with the master of dreams which clearly shows why neither of them should be trusted as babysitters, whilst the short, sharp ‘Interlude’ features a silent exploit that proves the amiable horror is no fisherman’s friend…

The rest of this supremely engaging, perilously poor taste comedy of terrors features the epic extravaganza ‘Night of the Living Dead Scout Zombies from Hell’ as a troupe of pious lads and their redoubtable guardian Father Barnaby come upon Booyah asleep in the woods. After an initial misunderstanding where the aged cleric tries to exorcise “the demon” and dies of a heart attack, the affable abnormality takes charge of the cub pack and tries to lead them out of the wilderness. Tragically the earth where they first bury poor old Barnaby is a secret testing ground for a new genetically modified crop – one the scurrilous Monsanlys© Corporation are only just discovering has some rather terrifying side-effects…

By the time Booyah gets the scouts to the edge of the forest he’s lost two more kids to tragic, explosively explicit accidents. They too have rejoined the bosom of the earth and the kingdom of heaven. As darkness falls the soil is ruptured by ghastly vegetable zombies sporting the standard super-infectious bite and soon the green goon and his last two charges (no longer good clean-living Christian boys, alas) are fighting for all they’re worth to suppress the horticultural horrors who have decimated the National Scout Jamboree…

Outrageously off-kilter, starkly sardonic and brutally hysterical, Booyah is the absolute antidote to anodyne touchy-feely cartoon capers, and if you love your comedy dark and your fantasy unexpurgated and splashed with spurting gut-bustingly jovial gore, this manically inventive immature-readers-only hoot (think of The Simpsons‘ Itchy and Scratchy with the kid gloves off) is definitely worth a few moments of your time.
© 2011 La Martiniere. English translation © 2011 Sloth Publishing, Ltd.

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Hellraisers – a Graphic Biography


By Robert Sellers & JAKe (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-906838-36-2

I’m a sucker for comics biographies, and when I saw this superbly engaging and imaginative one on the shelves of my local library I just couldn’t resist a peek…

Robert Sellers is a former stand-up comedian and current film journalist with prose biographies of Sting, Tom Cruise, Sean Connery and the Monty Python phenomenon to his name, as well a regular contributor to periodicals and magazines such as The Independent, Empire, Total Film, SFX and Cinema Retro. He has also been seen on TV.

In 2009 he published a magnificent history of brilliance and excess in his “Life and Inebriated Times of Burton, Harris, O’Toole and Reed” in 2011 in collaboration with prestigious illustrator, designer and animator JAKe (How to Speak Wookiee, cartoon series Geekboy, Mighty Book of Boosh, The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land and so much more, both singly and with the studio Detonator which he co-founded). The artist keeps himself to himself and lets his superb artistry do all the talking.

Self-adapted from his prose history of the iconic barnstorming British film and theatre legends Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Peter O’Toole, Sellers here transformed Hellraisers into a pictorial feast, featuring the unique lives of a quartet of new wave, working class thespian heroes – more famed for boozing and brawling than acting – into a masterful parable and celebration of the vital, vibrant creative force of rebellion, interpreted with savage, witty style in ferociously addictive and expressive monochrome cartoon and caricature by the enigmatic artist.

Working on the principle that a Hellraiser is “a person who causes trouble by violent, drunken or outrageous behaviour” and cloaked in the guise of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the salutary fable opens as another drunken reprobate is thrown out of another pub. It’s Christmas Eve at the Rose & Crown of Broken Dreams and Martin should be home with his wife and son.

After again disgracing himself the pathetic drunk staggers back, shaking with DT’s and unexpunged rage to his loving but scared family, only to pass out. He is awoken by his hellraising father who drank and smoked himself to death seven years ago…

Told that he has one last chance to save himself, Martin is warned that he will be visited by four spirits (no, not that sort) who will regale him with the stories of their lives and fates and failures and triumphs …

What follows is a beguiling journey of bitter self-discovery as Burton, Harris, Reed and O’Toole (still alive but part of the visitation of “spooky buggers” since it’s just a matter of time, my dear boy) recount their own sodden histories, experiences and considerations in an attempt to turn the neophyte around.

They’re certainly not that repentant, however, and even proud of the excesses and sheer exuberant manly mythology they’ve made of their lives…

Managing the masterful magic trick of perfectly capturing the sheer charismatic force and personality of these giants of their craft and willing accomplices in their own downfalls, this superb saga even ends on an upbeat note, but only after cataloguing the incredible achievements, starry careers, broken relationships, impossibly impressive and frequently hilarious exploits of debauchery, intoxication and affray perpetrated singly and in unison by the departed, unquiet soused souls…

Filled with the legendary exploits and barroom legends of four astoundingly gifted men who couldn’t stop breaking rules and hearts (especially their own), blessed or cursed with infinitely unquenchable thirsts for the hard stuff and appetites for self-destruction, this intoxicating and so very tasty tome venerates the myths these unforgettable icons promulgated and built around themselves, but never descends into pious recrimination or laudatory gratification.

It’s just how they were…

Sellers has the gift of forensic language and perfectly reproduces the voices and idiom of each star even as JAKe perfectly blends shocking historical reportage with evocative surreal metafiction in this wonderful example of the power of sequential narrative.

Clever, witty and unmissable.
© 2010 Robert Sellers and JAKe. All rights reserved.

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DNA Failure – British Weapon Comics


By Jon Chandler, Leon Sadler & Stefan Sadler (Picturebox)
ISBN: 978-0-9851595-4-2

In comics we’re most accustomed to seeing representationalism and an artistic aspiration towards commercial slickness, but at its most basic the art form is about getting ideas – and far too infrequently emotions – across in sequential form: building ideas and forms to an intended climax. In its purest form, however, talking pictures is all about the act of creation.

You all know people who paint or play music for fun, but how many of you are familiar with the kind of folk who make comics for anything other than commercial or career reasons: experimental craftsmen, raconteurs and artisans with no other honest intention than to see their stories told?

Jon Chandler, Leon and Stefan Sadler are members of prolific art collective Famicon Express and are all just such rare ducks, responsible for a host of decidedly different illustrated fictions such as The Blue Family, Mega Macerator, Ride into Chaos, Blood Bike, Police Worx,  I’m Gonna Kick You in the Nuts and many more.

Drawing much inspiration from manga maestro Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s geki-ga model – comics dark, adult and frequently uncaring of the necessity to entertain – the three innovators have collaborated here to deliver a succession of events set in a feudal wonderland of sharp gritty intensity and compelling free-ranging complexity.

It’s not about the story here but if you must know, Sting and Peter are wild lads in a bad time: getting into trouble stealing, fighting and running about being rowdy, even as the soldiers and villagers stumble from fight to fight and crisis to crisis. To further complicate matters Zeta and Gewgaw want to smuggle themselves aboard a departing galleon because the greedy donkey-beating Major stole their house. Moreover, the land is absolutely rife with annoyingly pushy magic fairy-men, giant burning rats, ghostly doppelgangers and time-travelling monks.

There’s even a moment of old-fashioned illustrated prose courtesy of the enigmatic GHXYK2 & LMS before Sting and Peter burrow under the castle to enter the knife-throwing competition…

Rude, rampant, offbeat and explosively outrageous, this fast-paced, ferocious stream of consciousness saga is unpolished, uproariously free and casually brutal in a raw intellectually anti-art style reminiscent of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit.

Here three cartoonists take turns turning many mediums on their heads, resulting in a composite scenario with echoes of classic fantasy and modern shared-universe role-playing wherein these bold British cartoon radicals co-opt the freewheeling nature of a strategic, life simulation video game and make it uniquely their own.

If you’re picky about grammar and syntax or wedded to polished art and story this exuberantly pell-mell rollercoaster probably won’t appeal, but if you love experimental bravado, tongue-in-cheek violent affray or spectacularly single-minded comedy carnage, this medieval mash-up might well be worth a few furious moments of your time.
© 2012 The Authors. All rights reserved.

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The Silver-Metal Lover


By Tanith Lee, adapted by Trina Robbins (Harmony/Crown Books)
ISBN: 0-517-55853-X

During the 1980s, comics finally began to filter through to the mainstream of American popular culture, helped in no small part by a few impressive adaptations of works of literary fantasy such as Michael Moorcock’s Elric or DC’s Science Fiction Graphic Novel line.

Cartoonist, author and comics historian Trina Robbins joined the throng with this deceptively powerful and effectively bittersweet romance adapted from Tanith Lee’s short tale about an earnest young girl in a spoiled, indolent world who discovered abiding love in the most unexpected of places.

In the far-flung, ferociously formal and civilised future everything is perfect – if you can afford it – but human nature has not evolved to match Mankind’s technological and sociological advancements.

Jane has everything a 16-year old could want but is still unhappy. Her mother Demeta provides all she needs – except human warmth – whilst her six registered friends do their best to provide for her growing associative and societal needs. Of her carefully selected peer circle, Jane only actually likes flighty, melodramatic needily narcissistic Egyptia – whom Jane’s mother approves of but considers certifiably insane.

In this world people can live in the clouds if they want, and robots perform most manual toil and tedious services, but it’s far from paradise. Humans still get suspicious and bored with their chatty labour-saving devices and the monumental Electronic Metals, Ltd strive constantly to improve their ubiquitous inventions…

One day Jane agrees to accompany Egyptia to an audition and the fully made-up thespian is accosted by a rude man who mistakes her for a new android. He wants to buy her.

Ruffled by the rude man’s manner, Jane’s attention is then distracted by a beautiful metal minstrel busking in the plaza. The robot’s performance and his lovely song move and frighten Jane in way she cannot understand, and when S.I.L.V.E.R. (Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot) affably introduces himself the flustered girl bolts, running for the relative security of the nearby home of sardonic friend Clovis, where the beautiful tart is in the process of dumping another lover. He proves unsurprisingly unsympathetic to Jane’s confusion and distress, telling her to go home where, still inexplicably upset, she tries to talk the experience out with her mother. Impatient as always, the matron simply enquires if Jane is masturbating enough before telling her to record whatever’s bothering her for mummy to deal with later…

Sulking in a bath Jane is awoken from a sleep by the ecstatic Egyptia who has passed her audition. Bubbling with glee the neophyte actress demands Jane join her at a big party. Avoiding a persistent old letch who is creepily fixated on the fresh young thing, Jane stumbles again upon S.I.L.V.E.R. and once more reacts histrionically to his singing.

As he profusely apologizes for the inexplicable distress he’s somehow caused her, Jane realizes the disturbing mechanical minstrel has been rented by Egyptia for quite another kind of performance later… a private one…

With a gasp of surprise Jane at last understands what she’s feeling and kisses the alluring automaton before fleeing.

Her mother is as useless as ever. Whilst futilely attempting to explain her problem but failing even to catch Demeta’s full attention, Jane gives up and claims she’s in love with Clovis just to cause a shock…

The next day the heartsick waif visits the offices of Electronic Metals, Ltd ostensibly to rent the droid of her dreams – as a minor she has to lie about her age – but is sickened when she finds him partially dissembled whilst the techs try to track down an anomalous response in his systems…

Despondent, she is astonished when Machiavellian Clovis intervenes, renting S.I.L.V.E.R. for Egyptia and convincing the too, too-busy starlet to let Jane look after it for her…

Alone with the object of her affection, insecure Jane’s imagined affair quickly becomes earthily, libidinously real but the honeymoon ends far too soon when Clovis informs her the rental period is over. Crippled by her burning love for the artificial Adonis, Jane begs her mother to buy him for her. When the cold guardian refuses the obsessed child at last rebels…

When Demeta disappears on another of her interminable business trips Jane sells her apartment’s contents, moves into the slums and desperately claims her dream lover with the ill-gotten gains…

Following a tragically brief transformative period of sheer uncompromised joy with her adored mechanical man, reality suddenly hits the happy couple hard as Demeta tracks Jane down and smugly applies financial pressure to force her wayward child to return. Undaunted, the pair become unlicensed street performers and grow ever closer but even as Jane grows in confidence and ability, becoming fiercely independent, public opinion has turned against the latest generation of far-too human mechanical servants. When Electronic Metals recalls all its now hated products, the improper couple flee the city. However the heartless auditors track them down and reclaim Jane’s Silver Metal Lover…

Lyrical and poetic, this is a grand old-fashioned tale of doomed love which still has a lot to say about transformation, growing up and walking your own path, with Trina Robbins’ idyllic and idealised cartooning deceptively disguising the heartbreaking savagery and brutal cruelty of the story to superb effect, making the tragedy even more potent.

Regrettably out of print for years, this is a comics experience long overdue for revival – perhaps in conjunction with new interpretations of the author’s later sequels to the saga of love against the odds…
Illustrations © 1985 Trina Robbins. Text © 1985 Tanith Lee. All rights reserved.

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Black Hole


By Charles Burns (JonathanCape)
ISBN: 978-0-22407-778-1

One of the most impressive and justifiably lauded graphic novels ever, Black Hole is a powerfully evocative allegorical horror story about sex, youth and transformation, but don’t let that deter you from reading it. It’s also a clever, moving, chilling and even uplifting tale that displays the bravura mastery of one of the greatest exponents of sequential narrative the English language has ever produced.

Originally released as a 12-issue limited series under the aegis of Kitchen Sink Press, the tale was rescued and completed through Fantagraphics when the pioneering Underground publisher folded in 1999. On completion Black Hole was promptly released in book form by Pantheon Press in 2005, although many fans and critics despaired at the abridged version which left out many of Burns’ most potent full-page character studies of the deeply troubled cast – an error of economy corrected in subsequent editions.

It has won eleven of the comic world’s most prestigious awards.

It’s the 1970s in Seattle, and there’s something very peculiar happening amongst the local teenagers out in the safe secure suburbs. In ‘Biology 101’, Keith Pearson can’t concentrate on properly dissecting his frog because his lab partner is Chris Rhodes, the veritable girl of his dreams.

Trying to keep cool only makes things worse and when he suddenly slips into a fantastic psychedelic daydream the swirling images resolve into a horrific miasma of sex, torn flesh and a sucking void.

Suddenly he’s regaining consciousness on the floor with the entire class standing over him. They’re all laughing at him… all except Chris…

‘Planet Xeno’ is a quiet patch of woodland adults don’t know about, where the kids can kick back, drink, smoke, get stoned and talk. The big topic among the guys is “the bug”, a sexually transmitted disease that causes bizarre, unpredictable mutations: uncontrolled growths, extra digits, pigmentation changes, new orifices that don’t bleed…

As Keith and best buds Dee and Todd shoot the breeze and goof off they discover an odd encampment, strewn with old toys and bottles and junk. Some of the sufferers of the “Teen Plague” have relocated here to the forest, founding a makeshift camp away from prying eyes and wagging tongues…

When Keith finds a girl’s shed skin hanging from a bush he fears the creepy mutants are closing in and suffers a crazy disorienting premonition…

Chris is dreaming in ‘SSSSSSSSSS’, a ghastly phantasmagoria that involves naked swimming in pollution, a load of strange guys, monsters and that fainting kid Keith turning into a serpent. It all ends with her examining the new holes in her body before ripping off her old skin and leaving it hanging on a bush…

She’s drinking illicit beer by the lake in ‘Racing Towards Something’, remembering that wild party a week ago and what she did with the cool guy Rob Facincanni. As she came on to him he kept trying to tell her something but she was in no mood to listen. She just didn’t want to be the good girl anymore…

She then recalls the moment of explosive climax and horror when she discovered the hideous second mouth in his neck and the noises. It seemed to be speaking…

In the sordid guilty aftermath she felt awful but had no idea what that furtive, disappointing assignation had done to her…

Rob is still sleeping with Lisa. She’s accepted the cost of the curse and the ghastly changes in her body but what she won’t take is him screwing around. She has heard Rob’s second mouth talking as they lay together and needs to know ‘Who’s Chris?’

Keith and his friends are getting stoned again when he hears that some guys have just watched the so-virginal Chris skinny-dipping and seen her sex-caused mutation. The virgin queen isn’t any more…

In ‘Cut’ their teasing proves too much and he storms off into the scrub and accidentally spots the object of his desire getting dressed again. Guiltily voyeuristic, he’s prompted to action when she steps on broken glass and cries out.

Dashing to her rescue he bandages her foot, too ashamed to admit just how much of her he’s really seen. All Keith knows is that someday he will be with her. Fate was obviously on his side…

‘Bag Action’ finds him and Dee trying to buy weed from a bunch of skeevy college guys, but the frustrated romantic is utterly unable to get lascivious, furtive, distracting naked images of Chris out of his mind.

However, after sampling some of the dope in the Frat boys’ dilapidated house, he meets their housemate Eliza, an eccentric artist extremely high, nearly naked and very hungry…

Just as baked, achingly horny and fascinated by her cute tail (not a euphemism), Keith almost has sex with her but is interrupted by his idiot pal at just the wrong moment…

Many of those infected by The Bug have camped out in the woods now and ‘Cook Out’ finds them having a desperate party around a roaring fire. Rob is there, bemoaning the fact that Lisa has kicked him out but he’s also acutely aware that the sex-warped kids are getting oddly wild, manic, even dangerous…

‘Seeing Double’ finds the devastated Chris talking things over with Rob at the outcast’s encampment. The naive fool has just discovered what’s she got and what it means. Lost and disgusted, convinced that she’s a dirty monster with a biological Scarlet Letter that is part of her flesh she drinks and talks and, eventually, finds comfort in her bad boy’s arms…

In ‘Windowpane’ Pearson, Dee and Todd drop their first tabs of acid and head for a party at Jill‘s house. The increasingly morose and troubled Keith is feeling ever more isolated and alienated and the LSD coursing through his system isn’t helping, When Dee and Jill start to make out, he leaves and finds her big sister crying outside. After she shouts at him he turns and, still tripping off his nut, heads into the woods.

Lost and confused, he sees horrific and bizarre things in the trees and bushes before stumbling into some of the infected kids around their fire. In a wave of expiation he begins to talk and keeps on going, slowly coming down amongst temporary friends. Keith has no suspicion that some of the things he saw were not imaginary at all…

‘Under Open Skies’ finds Chris and Rob playing hooky. Fully committed to each other now, they head to the coast and a perfect solitary day of love at the beach. They think it’s all going to be okay but the voice from Rob’s other mouth tells them otherwise…

Back home again, Chris’ recent good times are ruined by her parents’ reaction. Grounded, the former good girl makes up her mind and, gathering a few possessions, elopes with her lover to a new life in ‘The Woods’ where the grotesquely bestial but kindly Dave Barnes takes them under his wing.

Although they have bonded, Rob cannot stay with Chris but returns to his home and High School. Although he spends as much time as he can at the encampment, Chris is too often alone and on one of her excursions into the wilds finds a bizarre and frightening shrine.

Little does she know it’s one of the things the tripping Keith thought he had hallucinated…

Summer moves on and Pearson plucks up the nerve to go back to the college guys’ house. ‘Lizard Queen’ Eliza is on the porch, drawing but obviously upset by something. Confused, scared and without knowing what they’re doing they end up in bed, consummating that long-postponed act of drug-fuelled passion…

Chris’ days of innocent passion end suddenly when Rob is horrifically attacked by a lurking intruder in ‘I’m Sorry’ and she descends into a stupor for days until she spots nice safe Keith at one of the camp’s evening bonfire parties. Soon he’s arranged for her to move into an empty property he’s housesitting for ‘Summer Vacation’ but even though he’s attentive, kind, solicitous and so clearly wants to be with her, he’s just not Rob.

Chris has been going slowly crazy since her beloved boy vanished: reliving memories good and bad, feeling scared and abandoned, playing dangerously with the gun he left her “for protection”…

Keith is still plagued by nightmares and X-rated thoughts of Eliza in ‘A Dream Girl’ but hopeful that he has a chance with Chris, now. That swiftly changes when he checks on her and discovers that the house he’s supposed to be guarding has been trashed. There’s garbage everywhere, a bunch of her fellow outcasts have moved in and she’s clearly avoiding him, locked in a room, constantly “sleeping”…

Despondent and confused, Pearson doesn’t know what to do. Chris is having some kind of breakdown and the house – his responsibility – is a wreck. The lovesick fool is trapped and crumbling when Eliza breezes back into his life. If only his own bug mutation wasn’t so hideous…

Heading back to the home once more he finds that Chris has gone and the pigsty has become a charnel house…

Throughout the summer there has been a frightening, oppressive presence in the woods and with the Fall coming the mood is beginning to darken. When Dave is barracked and abused whilst trying to buy takeout food he snaps and pulls out Chris’ gun. Calmly taking his fried chicken from the crime-scene he walks back to the woods and the troubled soul known as ‘Rick the Dick’. It’s going to be their last meal…

Keith meanwhile has found his own happy ending ‘Driving South’ with the gloriously free and undemanding Eliza, but is still focussed on what he found at the house. At least he and Eliza helped the survivors get away, but now happily content with his idyllic artist girl and after all the horrible secrets they’ve shared, he can’t help wondering what happened to Chris…

That mystery and how Dave got the gun are only revealed in the compulsively low key and wildly visual climax of ‘The End’…

Complex, convoluted and utterly compelling, expressive, evocative and deeply, disturbingly phantasmagorical, Black Hole is a genuine comics masterpiece which applies graphic genius and astoundingly utilises allegory, metaphor, the dissatisfaction and alienation of youth, evolution and cultural ostracization as well as the eternal verities of love, aspiration, jealousy and death to concoct a tale no other medium could (although perhaps Luis Buñuel, David Lynch or David Cronenberg might have made a good go of it in film).

If you are over 16 and haven’t read it, do – and soon.
© 2005 Charles Burns. All rights reserved.