Category: Mature Reading

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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.

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Harem Nights


By Michel Lacombe & Yanick Paquette (Eros Comics/Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-354-6

This book contains stories and images of an extremely adult nature, specifically designed for the consumption of consenting adults. If reading about such things is likely to offend you, please stop now and go away. Why not come back tomorrow when I’ll uncover something different that will probably offend somebody else.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: if you do it right – and I know some people try really, really hard – sex is supposed to be fun.

Now we all know that in the real world nobody’s actually any good at nookie and there’s always someone trying to put a stop to it (hopefully not your own consenting, actively participating partner-of-choice) but fun-filled fictional fornication has usually sought to be a jolly, joyous affair – which is why so much pornography aspires to low comedy.

When esteemed champion of graphic diversity Fantagraphics jumped on the harmless smut bandwagon that proliferated in the American comics industry at the very end of the 1980s with their Eros Comics imprint, they initially gathered the most stylish of European and foreign adult material (such as Solano Lopez & Barreiro’s Young Witches – which is simply considered mere mature reading on the hang-up-free Continent) to complement quality home-grown creators such as Gilbert Hernandez, Bill Willingham and Ho Che Anderson (with Birdland, Ironwood and I Want to be Your Dog, respectively).

In such a creatively welcoming environment, might not such adults-only projects also attract horny young neophytes and talented newcomers with something fresh to say on the old-in-and-out?

One of the company’s all-new 4-issue miniseries for men – or at least folk with convincing fake IDs – was crafted by a couple of eager-beaver Canadians named Michel Lacombe & Yanick Paquette and offered a different twist on a positively ancient scenario beloved of lovers and romantics everywhere…

Following a wry comic strip introduction from pioneering cartoonist Jacques Boivin, the even-harder-after-midnight action begins in the ancient Middle Eastern city of Avalhad where unpopular but chosen-by-God Sultan Arful Al Hussaj lived a life of grotesquely hedonistic, shame-free excess. Although he was the most repulsive and stupid of men, his servants were devoted to his service and the many glorious women of his seraglio hungered for his attention.

That wasn’t surprising at all, for so ugly was Hussaj that the Court Wizard Ziebnad had placed a spell on all the nubile concubines. From sunset to sunrise all the harem girls were possessed by an insatiable hunger for man’s love: a fire that cruelly drove them all wild, long after the Sultan had made his nightly selection.

Those left unattended each evening writhed in desperate, agonising frustration, boiling with an unquenchable heat until the sun rose again and could even expire of unfulfilled arousal…

Neither the magus nor Hussaj cared: after all they were only women.

Tatia was one of those thus afflicted and although most of her sister courtesans were resigned to their nightly torture, she yearned to be free of it and her unwholesome master. Unhappy even in her daylight hours of sequestered opulence and indolence, her only companion and confidante was fellow concubine Bita – who secretly yearned for the blithely oblivious Tatia even when the sun was high in the sky and unseemly passions were not artificially enflamed…

Events came to head (yes I meant to say that) when Ziebnad finally convinced his master that for the sake of the kingdom he should stop screwing around and sire an heir.

Until then most of the Sultan’s predilections had taken him in other directions and down different avenues, but with his relatives now making openly seditious moves, caution dictated that Hussaj should ensure some dynastic continuity if he wanted to keep his head and the crown.

The Sultan reluctantly acquiesced but, rather than go to the trouble of finding a suitable wife, agreed to simply impregnate and wed one of the concubines he was already familiar with.

Whoever was picked that night would do…

As narrative would have it, Tatia got the nod and was brusquely married to the Sultan to legitimise the issue before the monster began to slake his nightly passions. Perhaps it was because everything started before sunset or perhaps the vile potentate was especially unwholesome this time, but as his own inner fires overwhelmed Hussaj, Tatia somehow rebelled and in disgust killed her new husband…

Fighting the withering power of the curse, she then fled the palace before she could be discovered and hid in the city: her ensorcelled libido making her a potential toy and victim of every man from merchant to beggar…

How the runaway bride escaped her pursuers, founds faithful allies, overthrew the corrupt regime, destroyed the wizard, freed herself and her fellow accursed concubines and eventually rode into the sunset with her hard-won true-love is an engaging if slight and lasciviously predictable tale that will amuse and delight open-minder lovers of erotica everywhere.

Of course in the end all of this is just an excuse to see naked people cavorting – and yippee! for all that – but there’s also a dark tale of oppression and hard-won liberation hiding under all that glistening skin and heaving flesh that successfully approaches that Holy Grail of Porn – a strong story that successfully holds together the bits between all the bonking…

Rude but not crude, naughty and nice, this is a great example of art for smut’s sake with no pretensions and a good deal to recommend it.
© 1994, 1995, 1999 Michel Lacombe & Yanick Paquette. All rights reserved.

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Tales Designed to Thrizzle volume two


By Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-615-7

Sometimes words mean nothing, pictures tell every story and stuff is funny just because it is. That pretty much sums up the work of absurdist Pop Culture Pirate comedy legend Michael Kupperman, whose graphic samplings of old comics, strips and magazines fill the pages of the too-infrequent comicbook Tales Designed to Thrizzle.

Kupperman is a cartoonist who clearly loves to draw and has no difficulty isolating the innate insanity of modern living as well as the way we regard our own past – especially the not-so-important bits – which he delivers in a surreal graphic deadpan style that would turn Buster Keaton grey with envy.

He created the strips Found in the Street and Up all Night, has worked for The New Yorker, Heavy Metal, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent on Sunday, LA Weekly, The New York Times, Libération, Fortune, Screw, Saturday Night Live and many similar reputable venues as well as in such comics as Hodags and Hodaddies, Hotwire, Snake Eyes, Zero Zero, Blood Orange and Legal Action Comics.

Kupperman’s first book Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret (2000) led to his breaking into the heady world of adult animation and he has been a much in-demand illustrator for other people’s book.

In 2011 he released the astoundingly madcap Mark Twain’s Autobiography: 1910-2010, but Tales Designed to Thrizzle has always been his most personal vehicle of expression, allowing him to play his abstractedly stylish mind-games against a dizzying cultural backdrop of Men’s “sweat mags”, True Confessions pulps, cheesy old comics, B-movies, cheap advertising, and a million other bastions of low-class Americana, all given a unique twist and spin by a man whose skull is clearly too small for his brain…

After far too long an interval, this second classy hardcover collects issues #5-8 in scintillating high-energy colour and opens with ‘Mandate the Magician’ learning a lesson in karmic humility, after which the hilarious cautionary tale of ‘Fart Boobs’ teaches us all why it’s unwise to mock an alien’s name, and a swift succession of short pithy strips introduce ‘Journey into Adventure’, ‘The Librarian in the Tuna Casserole’, ‘The Hoardy Boys’ and superstar team-in-waiting Twain & Einstein who realise ‘Good Grief! Still More Wuthering Heights’…

Many of the pages here are gloriously outré and absurdist graphic sight-gags: sham small ads and faux covers for comics and magazine which really shouldn’t be allowed: utterly daft delights such as ‘Remember the Past?’, ‘Ever-Approaching Grandpa’, ‘Sherlock Holmes versus Jungle Boy’, ‘Tales of the Intestinal Submarine’, ‘Johnny Exposition’ and ‘Show Me Your Weiner!’ but Kupperman is also a dab hand with words and typography as seen in his hilarious biography feature ‘Remember Them?’, the anti-melodic ‘Hum Along With your Grandkids’ and the Twain & Einstein prose vignettes ‘Albert Einstein’s Flashback Scheme’ and ‘Chasin’ the Dream’…

The pairing of the separated twins – at least as he draws them – clearly inspired Kupperman. After a succession of covers for Twain & Einstein comicbooks, the tale of ‘Mark Twain, Hollywood Detective’ pits the venerable satirist author and his pal the Father of Modern Physics against the seamy underworld of Tinseltown as both gumshoes and superheroes in a manic melange of genres and loving pastiche of the long-forgotten 1960s Archie superhero revival of Jerry Siegel & Paul Reinman…

Following an inappropriate letters page and ‘The Twain Files: 1975’, ‘Buzz Aldrin’s Strange Missions’ leads inevitably into ‘Real Old-Timey Horror’, with ‘Birth of the Monkees’ and EC homage ‘Legs to Die For!’ before exposing ‘Ben Franklin: Inventor of the Bar Code’.

‘The Odd Couple of Draculas’ holds some ‘Astonishing Heroes’, the saga of ‘Gladiator & Snivolus’ and ads for ‘Weird Sandwich Magazine’ whilst the astonishing extended epic of ‘Jungle Princess’ reveals how one could balance being a White Goddess with editing a high class fashion mag, and ‘Willie Wealth – the Rich Little Rich Boy’ learns to his cost that money isn’t everything – like proteinaceous for example – before ‘All About Drainage’ takes the lid off the ultra-sexy and glamorous sewage biz…

After discovering ‘Books are Stupid’ and that ‘Women Love Men in an Apiary Hat’ the Twain & Einstein movie ‘So Boldly We Dare’ is adapted into wholesome picture form, after which ‘Cowboy Oscar Wilde’ and some important supernatural commercial messages lead to the public service announcement ‘Old People! You need Insurance!’

Cute ‘Mr. Flopears’ and his little hostage situation segues seamlessly into ‘The Ghost’ and ‘Wonder Book Junior’s “Ride of a Lifetime”’, before ‘Scary Bathtub Stories’ discloses the horrific tale of the ‘Bath of Death’ and the wondrous wares of ‘Hubert’s Shower World’, but the real thrills only arrive with the “Bell Comics” reprint of ‘Quincy, M.E.’ – including the martial arts secrets of ‘Catare’ – which crosses over (literally) into two-fisted ‘Saint Peter Comics’…

Kupperman even dabbles in fumetti strips such as his photo ad for ‘Quincy’s Box of Things You Can Shout’, nicely breaking up the surrealist flow before the coroner and the first Pope slip into movie madness with ‘Quinception’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs 2 – featuring Snake ‘n’ Bacon’ and another fumetti interlude ‘A Voyage to Narnia’…

‘The Hamanimal’ almost brought low a prominent citizen even as crime dog ‘McArf’ stood resolute against all scum and Twain & Einstein faced shocking revelations in ‘Family Affairs’ before more Quincy, old Saint Peter, Air War Stories and Hunchback & the Hydrant covers give way to ‘Gordon Ramsay’s Fairy Tale Toilet Kitchen Nightmares’, even more outrageous covers and the tales of ‘Buddy Baker in the 25th Century’, ‘Billy & the Giant Gangster’ and ‘McGritte, the Surrealist Crime Dog’.

Just for fun you can enjoy a capacious section of ‘Red Warren’s Train & Bus Coloring Book’ (not recommended for the faint-hearted, weak-stomached or rationality-challenged) whilst ‘Murder, She Goat’ deals with the quite understandable concerns of stock characters when crime novelist Jessica Fetcher comes to town, after which a concerned stylist asks ‘Do You Have Thin, Wispy Pubic Hair?’ and we learn all about ‘Great Men of History: Bertrand Copillon, AKA “The Scythe”’.

As our inevitable climax nears, we learn more secret history in ‘Moon 69: The True Story of the 1969 Moon Launch’ – with crucial testimony from President Nixon, Aldrin & Armstrong, reporters Woodward & Bernstein, Quincy and Lieutenant Columbo – before more unseemly ads and one final appearance of Twain & Einstein in ‘Homework? No Work’ brings everything to an irresponsible close.

Also containing loads more stuff I’m too nice to spoil for you and too nervous to mention in even digital print, this implausible challenging and deliciously demented box of screwy surprises is an absolute panacea for all real life’s sundry woes and downers: brash, challenging, brilliantly imaginative and always funny.

This is a book for every grown-up, occasionally immature, couch-based life-form in need of a hearty guffaw every now and then – but much more now than then…
All characters, stories and artwork © 2012 Michael Kupperman. All rights reserved.

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Seven Miles a Second


By David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger & Marguerite van Cook (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-614-0

Every so often an outsider dabbles in the comics medium and brings something new to the tried-and-trusted mix which forces insiders to re-evaluate the way and the why of their preferred medium. Such a case was the collaboration between iconoclastic multi-media artist David Wojnarowicz, cartoonist and occasional comics pro James Romberger and painter Marguerite van Cook.

During the 1980s and until his death in 1992 Wojnarowicz was a public fireball: a restless and prolific author, poet, musician, painter, filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, advocate for Artist’s Rights, anti-censorship champion and political activist, driven and inspired to constantly create by his appallingly deprived and corrupted younger days as a teen runaway, street prostitute and AIDS sufferer.

Linked by surreal and iconic visual observations, the visual thesis consists of three interlinked episodes from the author’s life, threaded and embellished with reminiscences, observations, dreams and poetry to form a discourse with the world which made Wojnarowicz the compulsive, questing, wonderingly politicised rebel that he was.

With ‘Thirst’, we follow a worldly-wise, street-smart kid as he dodges Vice Cops and cruises for “Johns” on the 1970’s hustling, bustling corners of 42nd Street, before encountering just one more sad guy in search of negotiable warmth and temporary affection…

‘Stray Dogs’ takes place some years later as David and his latest dangerous boyfriend Willy struggle to feed themselves and trawl the soup kitchens, halfway houses and shelters in search of food and a safe place to sleep. Their nightmare journey through the dregs and gutters of the city would enrage a saint and make the Devil weep…

The disturbingly forensic inner narrative ends with a contemplative and breathtakingly introspective marshalling of ideas and experiences in the eponymous fantasy masterpiece ‘Seven Miles a Second’ (“the minimum velocity necessary to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth”). This explosively excessive tour of culture’s conjoined imagination was begun during Wojnarowicz’s final months and left uncompleted until Romberger, himself a renowned cartoonist and exhibition artist – particularly in his scenes of urban and inner city life – returned to the author’s incomplete notes and his own memories of the man to pull everything together.

This final painfully intense and intimate graphic narrative was initiated in 1989 and only completed after Wojnarowicz died from AIDS-related complications. The collaboration was posthumously released in 1996 as a Vertigo Prestige Format Publication – a slim 64-page comicbook-sized album which became a cult classic of the newborn “Literary Comics” movement.

Wojnarowicz’s lost masterpiece of graphic narrative has now been rescued by Fantagraphics: re-mastered, extended, expanded, augmented and repackaged in a lavish hardback oversized (298x229mm) edition that magnificently gifts this telling testament with the physical gravitas and presence it always deserved.

Illustrator Romberger and his wife Van Cook – whose original watercolour hues have been lovingly restored for this edition – have also included five new pages distilled from their intimate knowledge of Wojnarowicz for this breathtakingly evocative, challenging, terrifying, hallucinogenic, appallingly revelatory condemnation of a society that happily eats its weak and different,

Hard to take, frighteningly beautiful and staggeringly honest, this is a book that will – and must – upset all the right people, but is one that no mature, clear thinking devotee of graphic narrative should miss.

© 2012 James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook and the Estate of David Wojnarowicz. This Edition © 2012 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Solomon Kane volume 1: the Castle of the Devil


By Scott Allie, Mario Guevara, Dave Stewart & various (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-282-6

Following on from their revitalisation – if not actual creation – of the comicbook Sword and Sorcery genre in the early 1970s with their magnificent adaptation of pulp superstar Conan the Barbarian, Marvel Comics quite naturally looked for more of the same, and found ample material in Robert Ervin Howard’s other warrior heroes such as King Kull, Bran Mac Morn and dour Puritan Avenger Solomon Kane.

The fantasy genre had undergone a global prose revival in the paperback marketplace since the release of soft-cover editions of Lord of the Rings (first published in 1954), and the 1960s resurgence of two-fisted action extravaganzas by such pioneer writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline and Fritz Lieber. This led to a generation of modern writers such as Michael Moorcock and Lin Carter kick-starting their careers with contemporary interpretations of man, monster and mage. Without doubt, though, nobody did it better than the tragic Texan whose other red-handed stalwarts and tough guys such as El Borak, Steve Costigan, Dark Agnes and Red Sonya of Rogatino excelled in a host of associated genres and like milieus.

Solomon Kane debuted in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales in a gripping tale of vengeance entitled “Red Shadows”, making seven more appearances before vanishing in 1932 as his creator concentrated on the far more successful Conan. Three more tales, some epic poems and a few unfinished ideas and passages remained unpublished until 1968 when renewed interest in the author’s work prompted publishers to disinter and complete the yarns.

Apart from two noteworthy 4-colour exceptions, during the 1970s and 1980s, Marvel was content to leave Solomon Kane to monochrome adaptations of canonical Howard stories in Dracula Lives, Savage Sword of Conan, Monsters Unleashed and other older-reader magazines, but with his transfer to the Dark Horse stable the Holy Terror has recently flourished in broader, lavishly-hued interpretations of the unfinished snippets left when the prolific Howard took his life in 1936.

Beginning in 2008 and released as a succession of miniseries, these almost-new adventures offer the modern fan a far darker and more moody glimpse at the driven, doom-laden wanderer.

Kane is a disenfranchised English soldier of fortune in the 16th century on a self-appointed mission to roam the Earth doing God’s Work: punishing the wicked and destroying devils and monsters. With no seeming plan, the devout Puritan lets fate guide his footsteps ever towards trouble…

Expanded upon and scripted by Scott Allie from the tantalisingly unfinished fragment The Castle of the Devil, this initial paperback volume collects the 5-issue story-arc from September 2008-February 2009 and also includes a short piece which originally featured online in the digital MySpace Dark Horse Presents site in June 2008.

The drama opens as the surly pilgrim bloodily encounters bandits and an horrific wolf-beast in Germany’s Black Forest, losing his horse in the attack. Proceeding on foot he finds a boy hanging from a gibbet and cuts the near-dead body down. Soon after, he meets mercenary John Silent, another Englishman in search of fortune…

From his new companion, Kane learns that local lord, Baron von Staler, has an evil reputation and will not be happy to have his affairs meddled with. The puritan doesn’t care: he wants harsh words with the kind of man who would execute children…

Despite genuine misgivings the insufferably jolly Silent insists on accompanying his clearly suicidal countryman and soon the pair are admitted to a bleak and terrifying Schloss built on the remains of an old abbey…

Von Staler is not the mad tyrant they had been warned of. The gracious, pious old warrior with devoted servants and a beautiful young Moorish wife welcomes them in, offers them the hospitality of his hearth and charms them with his easy manner. The lord is appalled by the tale of the hanged boy, denying any knowledge of the atrocity and swearing to bring the culprits to justice.

Over supper he and his bride Mahasti explain that their ill-repute is unjustly earned. The simple peasants have unfairly conflated him with the manse’s previous accursed inhabitants: a chapter of monks who murdered their own Prior two centuries past.

Vater Stuttman had been a holy man until he sold himself to Satan and his desperate brethren had been forced to entomb and starve him to contain his evil. With the church determinedly ignoring their plight the chapter faded from the sight of Man and eventually Staler’s family had purchased the lands, building their ancestral seat upon the ruins.

The peasants however, still called it “the Church of the Devil”…

Gratified to find a man as devoted to God as himself, Kane relaxes for the first time in months, thankful to spend a night in a warm bed with people as devout as he…

The truth begins to out in ‘The Dead of Night’ as Silent goes prowling within the castle and kills one of the Baron’s retainers, even as Kane’s rest is disturbed by the shameless Mahasti offering herself to him…

Spurning her advances, the furious puritan leaves the citadel to wander the forest, again encountering the colossal wolf thing. Back in his bed Silent, nursing a deep wound, dreams of beleaguered old monks and their apostate Prior…

In ‘Offerings’ the truth slowly begins to dawn on the melancholy wanderer as he discourses with the strangely ill-tempered Silent. Something is badly amiss in the household, but when Kane and the Baron ride out that morning all suspicions are stayed by the discovery of another gibbet and another boy. This one however is nothing but ragged scraps for the crows that festoon his corpse, and Kane’s rage is dwarfed by the ghastly uncomprehending shock and disbelief of the Baron…

The servants however are not so flustered and something about their muted conversations with their master jars with the morose Englishman. And in the castle, Mahasti finds Silent a far more amenable prospect, happy to listen to the secrets she wants to share…

‘Sound Reasons and Evil Dictates’ offer more insights into the incredible truth about von Staler, as Kane takes his fellow Englishman into his full confidence before Silent and Mahasti ride out into the wild woods and meet a ghost who reveals the terrifying truth about the Vater Stuttman and the appalling thing the monks uncovered two hundred years past…

That demonic cadaver has whispered unknowable secrets to one of that long-gone congregation and has continued for all the days and years since. Now the man who was Father Albrecht is ready to welcome it and its appalling kin back to full, ravening life in these benighted grounds…

Von Staler and Kane are arguing and, as accusations become blows, the secret of ‘The Wolf’ is at last revealed, even as faithful retainers capture Mahasti and Silent, leaving them on the gibbets as fodder for a quartet of horrors returning for their fleshly tribute in ‘His Angels of the Four Winds’. Spectacularly battling his way free of the castle, Kane is only in time to save one of the monsters’ victims, but more than ready to avenge the centuries of slaughter and blasphemy in ‘The Chapel of the Devil’ and grimly cleansing the tainted lands in the ‘Epilogue: Wanderers on the Face of the Earth’…

The art is beguiling and emphatically evocative with Mario Guevara’s pencils astonishingly augmented by a painted palette courtesy of colourist Dave Stewart, and the book is packed with artistic extras and behind-the-scenes bonuses such as a gallery of covers and variants and ‘The Art of Solomon Kane’ with sketches and designs by the penciller, architectural shaper Guy Davis and illustrators John Cassaday, Stewart, Laura Martin & Joe Kubert before the tome terminates with that aforementioned digital vignette wherein Kane applies his own savage wisdom of Solomon to a troubled village of ghost-bedevilled souls in ‘The Nightcomers’…

Powerful, engaging and satisfactorily spooky, this fantasy fear-fest will delight both fans of the original canon and lovers of darkly dreaming, ghost-busting thrillers.
© 2009 Solomon Kane Inc. (“SKI”). Solomon Kane and all related characters, names and logos are ™ and ® SKI.

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American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar – New Revised Review


By Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Gregory Budgett, Gary Dumm, Gerry Shamray,
Kevin Brown, Susan Cavey & Val Mayerik (Ballantine Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-787-0

Before finding relative fame in the 21st century, Harvey Pekar occupied that ghastly niche so good at trapping the truly creative individual: Lots and lots of critical acclaim, and an occasional heart-breakingly close brush with super-stardom, without ever actually getting enough ahead to feel secure or appreciated.

One of those aforementioned brushes came in 1980s with the release of a couple of compilations of selected strips by mainstream publisher Doubleday that even to this day are some of his most powerful, honest and rewarding “literary comics” ever seen. By mercilessly haranguing, begging and even paying (out of his meagre civil service wages and occasional wheeler-deal) any artists who met his exacting intellectual standards, Pekar all but created the comics genre of autobiographical, existentially questing, slice-of-life graphic narratives whilst eking out a mostly lonely, hand-to-mouth existence in Cleveland, Ohio.

How the irascible, opinionated, objectionable, self-educated music-mad working stiff came to use the admittedly (then) impoverished comicbook medium to make a fiercely vital social commentary on American life of the ordinary Joe is a magical journey in the plebeian far better read than read about, but I’m going to have a crack at convincing any holdouts anyway.

Moreover, by the time you’ve seen this I’m already on to my next crusade…

This compendium combines and re-releases those seminal tomes in one big, bold edition and was released to tie-in with the award-winning 2003 indie film biography American Splendor, and opens with the superb contents of the 1985 release American Splendor: the Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, beginning by reproducing the introduction by early collaborator and modern Media Darling Robert Crumb before proceeding with a seductive welter of elegiac, confrontational, compulsive, challenging, painfully frank and distressingly honest observations that collectively changed the way English language comics were perceived, received and even created.

Rendered by Crumb, the excoriating graphic self-analysis begins with ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’ as the obsessive yet passive hunt for other people with the same name briefly gripped the self-confessed compulsive personality, whilst ‘The Young Crumb Story’ gave us Pekar’s take on the cartooning career of his collaborator, after which ‘A Fantasy’ again revisited the artist’s relationship with the writer: Pekar uncomfortably bragging over how he had browbeaten and gulled Crumb into drawing his scripts – and still was…

Gary Dumm illustrated the bizarre ‘Ozzie Nelson’s Open Letter to Crumb’ (written in 1972) describing the faded TV celebrity’s snotty pep talk to the cartooning degenerate, after which Crumb returned to deliver self-abusive insight as Pekar revealed ‘How I Quit Collecting Records – and Put Out a Comic Book with the Money I Saved’.

Greg Budgett & Dumm handled many of the most searingly honest introspectives such as ‘The Day Before the Be In’, the equally forthright and painful personal history sequels ‘Awakening to the Terror of the New Day’ and ‘Awakening to the Terror of the Same Old Day’ or the nigh-spiritual rationalisations of ‘Short Weekend – a Short Story About the Cosmic and the Ordinary’…

One of the most impressive facets of Pekar’s tales is the uncompromising depiction of the people he encountered in work or socially (if such a term can apply to such a self-admitted “judgemental jerk”) and the frankly brutal way he attempts to keep narrative polish out of his graphic reportage.

Incidents such as ‘A Compliment’ or ‘Jivin’ With Jack the Bellboy as he Goes About… Hustlin’ Sides’ and ‘Jack the Bellboy and Mr. Boats’ – all illustrated by Crumb – recount episodes with co-workers undistinguished, unremarkable and free of all dramatic embellishment or grace-saving charisma… but they are intoxicatingly real and appealing.

‘Read This’ (Budgett & Dumm) tells how even cynics can be surprised by people, whilst the Crumb-illustrated ‘Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines’ is as gently hilarious as their ‘Ridin’ the Dog’ vignette of cross-country bus travel is contemplatively reassuring.

Innovative Gerry Shamray tackled the wordy self-examination of life’s pointless frustrations in ‘An Argument at Work’ and the cathartic ‘Working Man’s Nightmare’ with aplomb and smart sensitivity, before Crumb resurfaced to draw an incredible familiar and unwelcome situation as the obnoxious ‘Freddy Visits for the Week End’. Regrettably we all have friends like him…

Pekar’s disastrous history with women was a frequent theme and ‘Ripoff Chick’ (by Budgett & Dumm again) showed why and how. The only difference between the author and most men was that he admitted up front that he wanted sex without complications or commitment…

‘One Good Turn Deserves Another’ (Shamray) invites us to share a typically penny-pinching secret, before Dumm tackled a quirky friendship and the perils of well-intentioned matchmaking in ‘Leonard & Marie’, and ordinary folk got tied up discussing theology and politics in Shamray’s wryly related ‘Noah’s Ark’. The artist then effectively encapsulated ‘Class Antagonism’ before Jewish intellectual Pekar again examined his ethnic and cultural roots by revisiting his relationship with Old World Hebrew ‘Emil’ (Dumm & Budgett) and the danger of first-hand accounts in the Crumb-illustrated ‘The Maggies (Oral History)’ and Shamray’s death-camp memoir ‘Kaparra’…

Crumb then turned in his most claustrophobic and impassioned drawing for the vibrant manifesto ‘American Splendor Assaults the Media’ after which the immensely stylish Kevin Brown limned a tale of frustrated selling out as Harvey attempted to schmooze up-and-coming movie star Wallace Shawn ‘Grubstreet, USA’, after which the first volume ended on a high of sorts with Pekar via Crumb temporarily resolving a ‘Hypothetical Quandary’.

The philosophising, reminiscing, ruminating, observing, eulogizing, questioning and fictively projecting promptly continues in From the Streets of Cleveland Comes… American Splendor: the Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, resuming the painfully honest – and to us here and now perhaps often unsettling and disquieting – accounts of normal lives with the Crumb-crafted classics ‘Pickled Okra (Okry)’, ‘Lunch with Carmella’, ‘Rollins on Time’ and ‘Visualize, Actualize, Realize’ – all containing commonplace friendly interactions with Pekar’s African-American co-workers that would make many genteel folk wince today…

A prospective hot date turned into a gruelling and pointless exercise in furniture moving in the Budgett & Dumm saga ‘Guerrilla Theatre: July ’74 – on the Corner’ with a punch-line not apparent until their ‘On the Corner… a Sequel: June 1976’, after which inker turned illustrator to relate the nostalgic revelations of young lust in the 1950s on the ‘Roller Coaster to Nowhere’, but some measure of cosmic karma was achieved decades later when Pekar finally achieve his  childhood goal of owning ultra-hip and so, so cool ‘Stetson Shoes’…

‘Mrs. Roosevelt and the Young Queen of Greece’ and ‘Busman’s Holiday’ by Dumm & Budgett celebrate the simple joy of guys simply sitting around shooting the breeze, whilst Crumb’s delicious treatment of Pekar’s love for old fashioned Jewish kvetching makes ‘Miracle Rabbis – a Dr. Gesundheit Story’ a minor masterpiece of comics.

‘An Everyday Horror Story’ (Shamray) then recaptures the tension and terror of Pekar’s first brush with serious illness – or so the author thought.

Always a healthy, vigorous but exceptionally excitable shouty man, Pekar got properly sick for the first time in his life and faced the very real prospect of never being able to speak again. This exceedingly gripping account perfectly presents all the fear, frustration, metaphysical pleading and moving emotional and practical support Harvey’s friends and then wife provided – and what happened next…

‘Alice Quinn’ drawn by S. (Susan) Cavey then detailed a portentous meeting with the girl who got away before Shamray’s powerfully captivating ‘I’ll be Forty Three on Friday (How I’m Living Now)’ offers a rare moment of optimistic clarity, and Cavey’s ‘Jury Duty’ shows how even the most earnest hopes and honest ambitions can worry the bejeezus out of “normal” folks…

For most of his life Pekar was that rarest of creatures – an un-typical American who chose not to drive (for good, sound and to my mind admirable reasons). Thus he often spent time cadging lifts and fretting about the etiquette of returning favours to his civilian chauffeurs. In ‘A Ride Home’ (Cavey) the impatience and anxiety grew momentarily too much, whilst in Dumm’s ‘Free Ride’ a long-standing arrangement with a previously admired old Jewish guy escalated into something ferociously passive-aggressive, quite strange and impossibly worrisome…

The same traumas afflicted Pekar when he foolishly bought his ex- wife’s automobile only to find it a cursed Jonah, which plagued him for many snowbound months in ‘Old Cars and Winter’ by Cavey. The superb and vastly underrated Val Mayerik joined the select band of artistic collaborators with the gloriously uplifting ‘A Marriage Album’, depicting life with beloved third wife with Joyce Brabner, and explored Pekar’s wild street-fighting juvenile days and later proclivities in ‘Violence’, whilst ‘History Repeats Itself’ offered a moment of resigned contemplation over teen spirits courtesy of Seán Carroll.

Mayerik contributed a final brace of gently contemplative pieces beginning with ‘A Matter of Life and…’ which saw an older, calmer author recap his life with a little more kindness than ever before, whilst an uneventful bus ride found Pekar gleaning a wealth of down-home ‘Common Sense’ from a voluble instructor driver before this masterful meander through a truly unique mind concludes with Crumb and the perfect solution to life’s ills with ‘Mr. Boats’ Miracle Cure’…

With art by individualistic collaborators who were never content to stay in their Comfort Zones but always endeavoured to make their contributions unique unto the story, and selected from a most adventurous and historically creative decade, these tales of working life, self-esteem, achievement, failure, religion, the media, Nazi atrocity, guilt, acceptable bigotry, proudly defended ignorance, friendship, aloofness and the art of understanding women are timeless slices of life’s dreary brilliance.

As a man who constantly assessed and re-examined his own creative worth and self, Harvey Pekar opened up his life to the world and changed it by being ordinary and average.

…Except he never was, as this superb insight into the mind and heart of a truly original comics creator will attest. This splendid, engrossing book offers readers a chance to see the humour, confusion and frustration of being an American thinker in a world that simply doesn’t value brains and spirit anymore – and I fear that’s going to be one of humanity’s eternal verities…

© 1976-1986, 2004 Harvey Pekar, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Ignition City


By Warren Ellis, Gianluca Pagliarani & Chris Dreier (Avatar Press)
ISBN: 978-1-59291-087-8

We don’t do clear, wide-eyed optimistic science fiction space opera any more. We’re all much more cynical, defensively sardonic and glumly disappointed: betrayed by the bland Future we inherited rather than the gleaming, enticingly simplistic one we were promised. It’s the 21st century, I still haven’t got my jet-pack and I’m not going to shut up until I get one…

Nevertheless the iconic heroes and villains invented for those now near-extinct Cold-War 20th century tomorrow people still provide the raw material for gripping, evocative post-modern futurist fodder and a few comics creators are truly proficient in blending that cheated Sense of Wonder with modern sensibilities to make whole new science fiction sensations.

One of the better recent modern myth-busting mini masterpieces was a 5-part miniseries from 2010: brainchild of acerbic wunderkind Warren Ellis, whose clear love of all things Wild, Black and Yonder have previously resulted in such superb speculative thrillers as Transmetropolitan, Ministry of Space and Aetheric Mechanics (this last also illustrated by Gianluca Pagliarani, the superbly effective co-creator of the particular space romp under the lens here).

The tale itself is an old and familiar one, but the setting is truly what gives this dark yarn its shockingly addictive appeal. On this Atompunk/Dieselpunk Earth, World War II was cut short when Martians invaded, prompting a couple of explosive decades when square-jawed, burly humans rode rockets to the stars and battled horrendous dictators such as Kharg the Killer, brutal despot of a fantastic alien empire who picked the wrong side when he allied himself with Adolf Hitler…

Now it’s 1956 and the lustre has tarnished for most Terrans regarding space.

With Cold War politics, economic woes and the fear of alien contamination – physical, cultural and social – the planet has turned against space and spacers.

There is only one place on Earth where ships even exist any more – the self-contained enclave island of Ignition City – where all those veteran astronauts grimly await the day when all off-world travel is finally banned.

For young Mary, daughter of interplanetary legend Arthur “Rock” Raven, it’s a cruel fate. Like so many who have been to infinity and beyond, she is addicted to the wonders of the void and the prospect of a life imprisoned on one world is unbearable.

When she gets notification that her dad has died in the interzone settlement ofIgnitionCityshe decides to go there and recover his personal effects – despite strenuous resistance from assorted governments, various Powers-that-be, close friends and her own mother. She has no illusions about her dad or the spacer’s life, but it’s what she wants and she’ll chase any remote chance to hold onto it. Ignoring all that pressure Mary consequently discovers that, as always, nothing is as it seems.

The artificial island is an anarchic hellhole. Draconian military outposts around the coast enclose and isolate a derelict, ramshackle and squalid shanty town of broken beings and beasts from a dozen worlds, eking out an existence amongst the ruins of ships and exotic cosmic technological debris. Everybody seems to be simultaneously waiting for one last chance to get off-world or just die and fade away.

Passing through immigration she first learns how the City is deadly dangerous and that corruption is a way of life as the civil servants confiscate her gun…

In the star-sucking slums, legends of her youth are growing old disgracefully and gradually dying. Saviour of the Universe Lightning Bowman has become the settlement’s chief gunrunner and his once-beloved Gayle Ransom runs a local bar: both eking out a living catering to the daily needs of an army of disillusioned spacers, and aliens trapped by the tide of the times. Their old comrade Doc Vukovic is a crazy hermit now: spending his days prowling the huge junkyards, cobbling together a ship to take him away from the hell of his home world. Violent death is a daily occurrence and only frowned upon because it generates unwelcome paperwork for corrupt Port Authority officials like the jetpack-riding Marshal Pomeroy.

Checking in to the boarding house where her dad died, Mary goes looking for answers and discovers Rock Raven was murdered in his bed. Inspired by discovering the “How”, her efforts to obtain a weapon don’t go as easily, but she’s still determined to stick around and find the “Why” and the “Who”…

Even greedy, paranoid, far-fallen from grace Cosmic Champion Bowman won’t sell her a weapon. He only urges her to get the hell out of the doomed city…

Sticking around and poking her nose in all the wrong places, Mary makes a few unlikely friends but no progress until she reclaims her father’s impervious old briefcase. Deftly manipulating a lock which a lot of people have clearly tried to breach, Mary finds the murdered spacer’s journal – and his fully-charged, highly illegal, honking great, souped-up ray-gun… just the kind of thing specifically prohibited by the authorities.

Now, she thinks, some answers are going to be forthcoming…

Soon, amidst a storm of blood and lethal radiations, she has uncovered why her father died, a sordid government conspiracy involving Humanity’s greatest foe and, with fallen arch-scientist Dragomir Vukovic (builder of the first rocket-ship in history), united the self-loathing, lost and ragged remnants of the Earth’s greatest – and only – star-panning generation to expose the greatest shame of the world which turned its back on the future…

In case you’re dense or just young, this epic space-western classily references, dismantles and reassembles all those glorious heroic archetypes and wonder-men of the pulp science fiction era (complete with cunning conceptual name checks for the iconic characters old farts like me grew up adoring: from the obvious Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to King of the Rocketmen, the Lensmen, Dan Dare and the rest) in a sharp, bleakly nihilistic tale beautifully rendered and crisply told, that still manages to enflame the frustrated simmering dreams in all of us doddery dreamers cheated out of the stars by shoddy tawdry reality…

Harsh, uncompromising and turbulently trenchant, this overwhelmingly entertaining tome also includes a host of design sheets, covers, variants and pin-up pages in a glorious Gallery section to cap off a powerful paean of praise to forgotten tomorrows which long-time sci-fi fans, comic readers and newcomers alike will adore.
© 2010 Avatar Press, Inc. Ignition City and all properties ™ & © 2010 Warren Ellis.

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Fringe


By Zack Whedon, Julia Cho, Mike Johnson, Alex Katsnelson, Danielle DiSpaltro, Matthew Pitts, Kim Cavyan, Tom Mandrake, Simon Coleby & Cliff Rathburn (WildStorm)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2491-2

Comicbooks always enjoyed a long, successful affiliation and almost symbiotic relationship with television, but in these days when even the ubiquitous goggle-box business is paralysed and endangered by on-demand streaming, too many channels and far too much choice, the numbers and types of program that migrate to funnybooks is increasingly limited.

Excluding kids’ animation shows, cult fantasy adventure series now predominate in this dwindling arena and one such that made an impressive – albeit troubled – transition to the printed page featured the enthrallingly bizarre cases of the FBI’s “Fringe Division” – a joint Federal Task Force assembled to tackle all threats to Homeland Security presented by unexplained phenomena.

Over five seasons from 2008, the TV series wove an intricate tapestry of technological terrors into an overarching grand design starring ex-lab rat and current FBI agent Olivia Dunham, institutionalised experimenter Dr. Walter Bishop and the freshly paroled scientist’s estranged son Peter; who were forced together and given a remarkably free hand to deal with a growing epidemic of ghastly – apparently unconnected – events.

Using government resources and the suspiciously convenient aid of scientific and industrial powerhouse Massive Dynamic – a company formed by Bishop Senior’s old lab partner William Bell – the team every week confronted untold horrors ranging from genetic monsters and abominations, technological terrorists, mad scientists, unsanctioned trans-human experimentation, ancient civilisations, hidden cults, purported alien invasions, time travel, parallel universes and even weirder stuff…

That all sounds like a lot to take in before reading a book cold, but even if you are unaware of the parent series this particular collection, re-presenting stories from the first Fringe 6-issue miniseries, ought to be worth a moment of your time; especially since it was designed as a prequel describing the growing relationship and early exploits of college wonder-kids Bell and Bishop in the heady days before William went incomprehensibly corporate and Walter went dangerously mad…

Moreover each chapter on the road to Fringe (this saga ends with Agent Dunham rescuing the brilliant but bewildered Walter Bishop from a decades-long incarceration in draconian mental hospital St Claire’s – as seen in the television pilot) is supplemented with an eerie many-layered, self-contained instalment depicting the kind of case the unit was formed to combat…

Almost entirely illustrated by the moodily magnificent Tom Mandrake, the dates with destiny begin in ‘Bell and Bishop: Like Minds’, scripted by Zack Whedon & Julia Cho, wherein shy, unassuming young graduate student Walter meets his frivolous future lab partner William Bell. It’s 1974 and Harvard has no idea what the at-first acrimonious odd couple are capable of…

When mystery Man-In-Black Richard Bradbury offers them unlimited resources and absolutely no annoying legal or ethical restrictions to assist in their researches in Quantum Entanglement, the Young Turks – after some initial qualms – soon find themselves at a top-secret private facility in Alaska in the Mike Johnson authored ‘Excellent Soap’.

Although the Fresh Start Soap Company is ostensibly a commercial enterprise, the student geniuses are keenly aware that they’re now working for a clandestine government agency in their quest to create a feasible teleportation device, but are pathetically unprepared for the draconian shop of horrors they find themselves in…

Only sexy scientist Dr. Rachel Matheson seems to be on their side as they plan ‘The Escape’ (written by Alex Katsnelson) but since even their very thoughts are open to the sinister supervisors of the facility, nobody can truly be trusted – even after they make their spectacular, physics-bending getaway…

As Mandrake stepped up the artistic angst, Danielle DiSpaltro & Katsnelson took over for ‘Bell and Bishop: Best Laid Plans’ wherein the older, wiser pair found that they literally can’t refuse a “request” from the US Air Force to examine a potentially alien artefact recovered after a raid in Argentina. With no choice and the temptation of something truly unknown to tinker with the students set to, but realise too late that letting Belly’s dog run loose in the lab was a really bad idea…

Catapulted back to Nazi Germany in 1945, William is forced to admit to his dubious ancestry when ‘It Runs in the Family’ (DiSpaltro & Katsnelson) leads them to a top-secret factory where the artefact was built. Moreover it was designed by a young Wehrmacht genius who would one day beBell’s father…

This section then ends with ‘Bell and Bishop: The Visitor’ (DiSpaltro, Justin Doble, Katsnelson & Mandrake) as, in 2008, outrageously over-medicated psychiatric patient Walter Bishop endures another punishing round of electro-convulsive therapy and refuses to deny the memories we’ve shared for the previous five chapters.

However institute director Sumner is unaware that the FBI agent “treating” his brilliant patient is an impostor tasked with extracting Bishop’s technical secrets and hidden discoveries. Even as the genuine Feds move to have Walter released, the still-brilliant savant is executing his own plans to get free and end his daily torments.

Good thing too – since the fraudulent inquisitor has orders to let nobody else have access to his distraught subject’s drug-drowned memories…

As the main story leads into Walter’s introduction to Olivia, this collection seamlessly slips into the aforementioned Strange Cases beginning with ‘The Prisoner’ scripted by Katsnelson & DiSpaltro with art from Simon Coleby & Cliff Rathburn, wherein a happily-married decent citizen suddenly wakes up in the body of a maximum-security convict – and that’s only his first stop, whilst ‘Strangers on a Train’ (Katsnelson, Matthew Pitts & Mandrake) offers a bewildered spy a terrifying, unending Moebius trip when he has to courier a mysterious device to his unreachable final destination…

On the birth of a baby whose very presence killed everything near him, the Government stepped in and raised the boy in utter isolation and in the interests of National Security. ‘Run Away’ by Johnson & Mandrake showed what happened years later after the lad had grown into a rebellious teenager, desperate for human contact and smart enough to escape from the High Security lab he’d always been penned in.

In ‘Space Cowboy’ (Kim Cavyan & Mandrake) a celebrated Astronaut’s unexpected death revealed some unwelcome effects about the “vitamins” his superiors had been making him take, and this chilling thrilling compendium closes with ‘Hard Copy’ by Johnson & Mandrake and the final shocking scoop of TV journalist Michelle Taylor whose sensation-chasing “weird science” reports always led her back to the Global Good Guys corporation Massive Dynamic.

It was such a shame she never paid better attention to the stories she broadcast or remembered that nobody was irreplaceable. Still, no one noticed when she was…

Dark, clever and immensely entertaining in the classic conspiracy theory mould, this book is a smart and very readable fiction-feast even for those with no knowledge of the source material, whilst fans of the show will reap huge extra enjoyment dividends by talking a sneaky peek into this catalogue of the unknown…
© 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. Fringe and all characters, distinctive likenesses and related elements are ™ of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

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Pigeons from Hell


By Robert E. Howard, adapted by Scott Hampton (Eclipse Books)
ISBN: 0-913035-69-6 (HC), 0-913035-68-9 (PB)

Robert Ervin Howard is justly celebrated for his burly, barbarian sword and sorcery creations such as Conan, Kull, Bran Mak Morn and others but as a successful jobbing writer in the heyday of pulp fiction he also turned his blazing typewriter to most of the other extant genres of the era. Moreover, as aficionados of his blistering fantasy fiction are well aware, he was a dab hand at creating tension, suspense and moody macabre horror.

During the too-brief time of his creative peak he crafted a select pack of chilling spooky supernatural stories set in the evocative southern milieu known as ArkLaTex – a doom-shrouded, Deep South meeting-point of the darkest corners of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and his beloved Texas.

Inspired by old stories heard at his grandmother’s knee Howard transformed oft-told anecdotes into masterpieces of terror such as ‘The Shadow of the Beast’, ‘Moon of Zambebwie’, ‘Black Hound of Death’, ‘Black Canaan’ and the yarn under scrutiny here: a creation described by Stephen King as “one of the finest horror stories of our century”…

The tirelessly prolific Howard committed suicide in 1936 and the prose Pigeons from Hell (unsold since its creation in 1932) was published posthumously in the May 1938 edition of premier pulp Weird Tales. It has become a classic not just of the genre but also a notional inclusion of the blackly prestigious Southern Gothic movement of writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams and others.

In 1988 the original text was incorporated into a stunning, lavishly painted adaptation by Scott Hampton released by West Coast maverick publishers Eclipse and, despite a more recent version by Joe R. Lansdale & Nathan Fox in 2008, remains one of the best graphic novels ever produced, in no small part due to its being crafted in magnificently lush, larger-than-life glossy square, white pages produced in the oversized European Album format of 285 x 220mm rather than the standard US proportions of 258 x 168mm.

Following a passionate Introduction from Horrorist Supreme Ramsey Campbell the exercise in the unnatural opens with ‘The Whistler in the Dark’ as two perambulating New Englanders bumming their way across America on a motoring vacation reach the deep dark southlands region of “Piney Woods” and decide to spend the night in a decrepit and abandoned antebellum plantation house.

Crashing out on the musty floor of the main downstairs room they lapse into exhausted sleep but in the middle of night Griswell is awoken by bad dreams. It had begun with a replaying of the pair’s arrival at sunset, their discovery of the old building and the oddly ethereal white birds their presence had disturbed. It had moved on to their quick, cold repast and weary lapse into slumber before shifting into nightmare feelings of disquiet. When he had started awake again, anxious and disturbed, it was with images of ghostly doves, hidden rooms with ancient hanging bodies and a sense that something was hiding just beyond his sight…

Trying to shake himself awake Griswold suddenly heard an eerie whistling and, helpless, watched his companion Branner rise as if sleepwalking to ascend the grand staircase to the upper storey into the all enveloping darkness. Incapable of movement Griswell followed the sounds of his friend’s progress and suddenly, a hideous scream…

Before he could move he heard Branner’s slow return and, when moonlight allowed him a glimpse of his companion, the sight was enough to send Griswold screaming helter-skelter into the night…

Reaching their automobile he found he vehicle infested with snakes, and running on felt some unknown beast at his heels. Careering on, he ran straight into a local lawman who instantly emptied his revolver into the shadow that pursued…

‘Return’ fully introduced the capable Sheriff Buckner, who surprisingly accepted much of Griswell’s incredible tale and provided historical insight into the woeful tale and sinister reputation of the Blassenville Manor as he and the terrified vacationer revisited – in daylight – the scene of dreadful slaughter.

Quickly ruling out the possibility of argument and murder amongst the friends, Buckner began searching the house for the true killer but came up empty. Furthermore, knowing how bad things would look in a rational courtroom, he invited the traumatised Griswell to help him get to the truth – by joining him in spending another night in the house…

‘The Snake’s Brother’ finds them preparing for that horrific prospect by researching the tragic history of the last of the Blassenvilles. In the years following the Civil War three unwed daughters and a cousin, struggling to maintain the old pile, were eventually joined and chaperoned by their cold and brutal Aunt Celia,  who had returned from the West Indies to watch over them.

Celia was a terrifying creature, as harsh with the girls as she was with the remaining plantation staff and her own much-maltreated mulatto maid Joan…

The legend of the girls’ mysterious and sudden disappearance was common knowledge, but for more details Buckner and Griswold questioned an aged Negro who used to work on the plantation. When pressed, the still-mortally terrified dotard Jacob revealed a fantastic tale of brutal oppression, serpent worship, voodoo and ghastly unleashed, brooding vengeance before he was hideously struck down by the power that lurked in mansion…

Appalled, deeply shaken but still determined, Buckner and Griswold head for the Manor, mistakenly believing that they have a handle on what unquiet horror haunts the place and how to handle it in ‘The Call of Zuvembie’. They have jumped to a ghastly, tragic wrong conclusion…

Not only is the original prose work one of the best pieces of horror fiction ever written, but in this rare instance the graphic adaptation – crafted over two long and meticulous years byHampton- more than matches the power and all-encompassing mood of its source material. This is a classic of the graphic narrative medium no fan will want to miss – but only with all the lights on…
© 1932, 1988 the Estate of Robert E, Howard, Glenn Lord Executor. Adaptation and painting © 1988 Scott Hampton. Introduction © 1988 Ramsey Campbell.

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Problematic: Sketchbook Drawings 2004-2012


By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-594-5

Some creators in the world of comics just defy description and their graphic novels and collections are beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly) to elucidate or encapsulate. Some are just so pedestrian or mind-numbingly bad that one simply can’t face writing about them. Others are so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise and analysis can do them justice.

At the apex of that tricky funnybook pyramid is Jim Woodring: a position he has maintained for years and clearly appears capable of holding for years to come. Woodring’s work is challenging, spiritual, philosophical, funny, beautiful and extremely scary. And, even after reading that sentence, you will have absolutely no idea of what you will be seeing the first time you read any of it.

Moreover, even if you have scrupulously followed cartoonist, animator, Fine Artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance Man James William Woodring through an eccentric career spanning his first mini-comics in 1980, the groundbreaking Fantagraphics magazine series such as Jim (1986), the notional spin-off Frank (of which Weathercraft was the latest incredible instalment), Tantalizing Stories, Seeing Things, Congress of the Animals or his more mainstream features such as Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse, you’ll still have no idea how you will respond to his newest work.

Woodring delivers surreal, abstract, wild, rational, primal cartooning: his clean-mannered art a blend of woodblock prints, Robert Crumb style, wry humour and eerie conviviality, Dreamscape, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria. His works form a logical, progressional narrative pockmarked with multiple layers of meaning but generally void of speech or words, magnificently dependent on the intense involvement of the reader as a fully active participant.

So you can imagine what his first formative thoughts, passing observations and moments of wild unfettered graphic whimsy must be like…

This stunning little hardback opens the gates of dream just a crack and offers selected graphic snippets from his sketchbooks covering the superbly productive period following the millennium and offering a few choice views of the other graphic avenues he could have travelled if the world of harnessed hallucinations had not such a strong hold…

In his ‘Introduct’ Woodring describes his abandonment of traditional graphic tomes for diminutive “Moleskine” doodle-pads, using the flimsy palm-sized books to capture ideas roughly, quickly and with intense immediacy …and the gimmick clearly works.

The material collected here – mostly enlarged 140% up from the originals – simply buzzes with life and energy.

Many Frank regulars appear, including the eponymous Krazy Kat-like ingénue himself, and there are absolute torrents of bizarre, god-like household appliances, vulture-things, frog-things, rhino-things, plant-things and unspeakable Thing-things, that inhabit the insanely logical traumic universe of his sensoria.

There are snippets of reportage, plenty of designs and even roughs and layouts from finished stories. Woodring also proves himself a pretty sharp pencil when it comes to capturing the weird moment of reality we all experience, a keen caricaturist and a deliciously funny “straight gag-man”, glamour artist and capturer of friends in idle moments – just like all of us sad art-school escapees who break into a cold sweat whenever we realise we’ve left the sketchbook at home and there’s only beer-mats and napkins to draw on….

Woodring is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – for starters, his drawings have a distressing habit of creeping back long after you’ve put the book down and scaring the bejeezus out of you – but he is an undisputed master of the form and an innovator always warping the creative envelope.

As such this welcome peek into his creative process and conceptual/visual syllabary offers encouragement and delight to artists and storytellers of every stripe, as well as being just plain wonderful to see.

All art-forms need such creators and this glorious hardback monochrome tome could well change your working and reading habits for life.

Go on, aren’t you tempted, tantalized or terrified yet? What about curious, then…?
© 2012 Jim Woodring. This edition © 2012 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.