Category: Mature Reading

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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.

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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.