Category: Mature Reading

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The Brain Eaters Bible – Sound Advice for the Newly Reanimated Zombie


By J. D. McGhoul with Pat Kilbane, Brian Ulrich, Dean Jones, Neil D’Monte & others (St. Martin’sGriffin)
ISBN: 978-1-250-02401-5

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: an ideal antidote for adult over-indulgence… 8/10

With the world in the dry, dusty grip of a Zombie Apocalypse and at least oneAmericanUniversityoffering Zombie Studies as part of its curriculum, it was only a matter of time before the perhaps misunderstood flesh-addicted revenants gained their own advocate for their particular post-lifestyle.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of zombie stories but occasionally something really tasty comes along and I’m forced to re-evaluate my position. Such an item is this wryly outrageous almanac from comedian, author and actor Pat Kilbane (Mad TV, Seinfeld, Semi-Pro, My Name Is Earl), a vast production team of artists, designers, photographers, make-up and FX folk, actors, models, martial artists, stuntmen and armourers, and ex-lab technician J.D. McGhoul who, since his passing, has worked tirelessly as an activist and educator for the burgeoning population of meat-seeking martyrs whose only hope is for a little piece – preferably of frontal, temporal or parietal lobe…

Together this dedicated group have merrily compiled a deliciously morbid foundation class in everything the newly-infected but so much more than brain-dead “walker” needs to keep unfit, unwell and full…

Although nobody living really knows the origins of the PACE (Postmortem Ambulation with Cannibalistic Encephalophilia) virus – the unsavoury savant here attributes it to stem-cell research gone wonky – the effects are obvious, apparent and permanent.

Thus there are plenty of sagacious asides about the worthlessness of moisturisers but extreme necessity of Febreze™, the commonsense of keeping your head covered, the pros and cons of working in groups and the necessity of never, ever underestimating the cunning and nastiness of the “Freshies” who constitute your preferred fodder…

Following the introspective Introduction and ‘Mouthful of Mud’ – the first of seven insightful Journal Entries about the unlife of the undead from Mr. McGhoul – the first comprehensive chapter Eat Brains describes in piercing detail ‘A Way of Life’, the ‘Reasons for Eating Brains’, ‘Only Live Brains; Only Human’, mind you, and then advises ‘Listen to your Cravings’, ‘Types of Brains’, ‘A Tough Nut’, ‘Brain Bits for the Connoisseur’ and ‘Health Concerns’ before discoursing ‘On Cannibalism’ and recommending ‘Just Love It’…

Know Your Body deals with ‘A New You’, ‘The PACE Infection’, how ‘A Plague is Born’, ‘Infection’, ‘Zombie Organs’, ‘Bodily Capacities’ and ‘Other Anatomical Facts’ whilst Hunt deals with ‘Brain Acquisition’, ‘Our Right to Make People Extinct’, ‘Pack Hunting’, ‘Ambush Hunting’, ‘New Principles of Combat’, ‘Close Combat Attack Techniques’, ‘Using Firearms’, ‘Using Other Weapons’ and offers some ‘Final Thoughts on Hunting & Combat’.

Interspersed with and following more plangent Journal Entries – ‘Hell’s Ragged Edge’, ‘Bitter and Raw’ and ‘Headhunter Laureate’, chapter 4 details how to Know Your Enemy: categorising the types and tactics of ‘Your Opposition in War’, ‘Sizing Them Up’ and pictorially detailing ‘Human Weaponry’ – ‘Handguns’, ‘Submachine Guns’, ‘Rifles and Carbines’, ‘Shotguns’, ‘Bows and Arrows’, ‘Thrown Weapons’, ‘Swung Weapons’ and ‘Thrusting Weapons’, before demonstrating ‘Human Combat Training’, ‘The Human Fear Response’, ‘Human Vulnerabilities’ and how in the end they are ‘Their Own Worst Enemy’.

‘Whom Shall I Fear’ is another inspiring extract from the author’s Journal Entries after which Move Your Head offers ‘A Defensive Mantra’, ‘Protective Stances’, ‘Self-Defense Techniques’, what is best when ‘Fighting Multiple Foes’, the merits of ‘Zombie Headgear’, ‘Serpentining’, ‘The Invisible Hunter’, how to be ‘The Elusive Traveller’ and why one must learn to ‘Stop, Look, Listen, Smell’, ‘Destroy Captured Assets’ and ‘Leave No Witnesses’…

From the Journal Entries comes the philosophy of ‘Self-Knowledge’ whilst the spiritual aspect and overarching mission of the Zombie Way is detailed in Infect Others as ‘The Four I’s’ – ‘Ingest’, ‘Infect’, ‘Inject’ and ‘Instruct’ before the final Journal Entry – ‘My Brother’s Maker’ reveals the aspirational hope that one day the world can be theirs…

Ostensibly written by erudite undead philosopher J.D. McGhoul, and with a savagely detached tongue firmly embedded in a torn and ragged cheek, this tome delivers a devilishly sly and hilarious fresh take on the undead, told with devastating, deadpan delivery and Goriously illustrated with photos, diagrams and drawings: a uproarious, marvellously authentic treat for every mordantly shambling horror fanatic and bleakly black humourist…

And if you can’t sleep at night just wear a steel crash helmet and keep telling yourself “Zombies don’t exist”.  You’ll be fine.

Probably.
© 2010 Mythodrome Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Whiteout volume 1 – Definitive Edition


By Greg Rucka & Steve Lieber (Oni Press)
ISBN: 978-1-932664-70-6

When done right there’s no artistic medium which can better depict the myriad intricacies of a murder-mystery than the comic strip.

The superb and seminal piece of crime fiction under review today was the 2D debut of novelist Greg Rucka and saw mid-ranking artist Steve Lieber achieve his full illustrative potential in a gripping chiller set in a world where, despite appearances, nothing is simply black and white…

Originally released as a 4-part miniseries from Oni Press in 1998, Whiteout introduces disgraced Deputy U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko, banished to the ends of the Earth – generally known as McMurdo Station,Antarctica – following a tremendous and unforgivable screw-up during her stateside duties.

Seamlessly filling in crucial background detail as it swiftly progresses, we soon learn that Antarctica is a bizarre “Neutral Zone” co-managed by the USA, Britain, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and other nations where mineral exploitation is forbidden by treaty, military weapons are proscribed and there are 400 guys to every girl.Antarcticais a place where all Man’s basest instincts are curtailed by official accord – or at least that’s the international party line…

In the cold and isolated outpost Stetko hadn’t gone out of her way to adapt, settle in or make friends in a place where few people stay for more than a few months whether they’re involved with the military, explorers, scientists or even dubious business types.

It’s dull drudgery all the way but that ends when Carrie is called out to examine a body on the ice…

The face has been horrendously removed from the brittle corpse but the remote area is a mess, with multiple deep core-samples removed from the frozen wastes and Stetko wouldn’t even be involved if the body wasn’t clad in a parka with American flags on it. Even after prying the cadaver loose from the ice, Carrie has to wait days for it to thaw enough before the camp doctor everyone calls Furry can begin his autopsy.

More worryingly, further investigation reveals that the international research expedition was supposed to comprise five men – two Americans, a Briton, an Argentinean and an Austrian. Where and who are the other four …?

Sole friendly face Furry is having little luck with the body. Somebody used an ice hammer to make sure identification was impossible, but the diligent doc gets enough from the remains of the feet to fax off prints to the U.S. Eventually the details return and Carrie begins to search for the killer of Alexander Keller, American citizen – and not one of the research team at all…

Interviewing the pilot who ferried the team produces no leads and days are wasted checking the other bases by radio. Moreover, time is running out. With true Winter coming most camps are preparing to shut down: ferrying all but the most essential staff back to civilisation until the slightly more hospitable Spring makes life on the ice survivable. Once “Winter-over” begins, the killer will be impossible to find…

When she gets a call back from British-administered Victoria Station that two of the missing team are there, she catches a break by hitching on a flight ferrying Australian pilot John Haden to his next gig. Despite his easy charm and manner Carrie knows there’s something not right about him…

Rendezvousing with officious administrator Lily Sharpe, Carrie refuses to wait out another impending storm and both women venture out onto the ice to find the outlying cabin of the missing men. As they enter they are attacked by an axe-wielding masked man who has just killed both of her suspects in the same way that Keller was dispatched…

Giving chase into the storm Carrie is overpowered and her vital guide-wire cut. Lost in a binding whiteout with the temperature drastically dropping by the second, she is going to die mere feet from safety and might not be found for months…

As Sharpe recovers and follows, Stetko has, with Herculean determination and a deal of sheer luck, found a sanctuary where she is temporary safe if no longer sound. She never will be again…

Lost in delirium and suppressed memories, Carrie almost fights her way free from her last-minute rescuer but is at last taken to the Station’s infirmary. When she’s fit enough to travel the mysterious Lily ferries the Marshal back to McMurdo and reveals that the two remaining suspects have been spotted on the ice at Amundsen-Scott base.

As much through anger and resentment as her boss’ insistence Carrie, with Sharpe in tow, heads after them and on reaching the distant station receives an astounding surprise when she spots dead man Keller in the canteen…

Sharpe meanwhile has got the last two suspects. Or at least, their bloody, battered remains…

Keller eludes the Marshal and lies hidden in Sharpe’s plane where he finds her gun. Of course according to the Antarctica Treaty all weapons are banned on the jointly-administered continent, but that is far from being the British woman’s biggest secret…

The drama kicks into high octane high gear as Keller and his hidden allies mercilessly strike back before the mystery and motives are revealed and the stunning conclusion reveals just how dangerous trust can be in a land which scours the heart and soul every minute of every day…

Smart, cynical and intoxicatingly devious, this superb fair-play murder mystery is one of the best comics crime capes of the last fifty years, spawning one sequel so far and offering the tantalising prospect of a third…

Cool, cruel and so, so good, this is a book for all mature comics readers and fiction fans alike…
™ & © 1998, 1999 2007 Greg Rucka. All rights reserved.

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Prison Pit Book Four


By Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-591-4

Johnny Ryan is a comedian who uses comics as his most liberated medium of expression. Whether in his own Angry Youth Comix, or the many commissions for such varied clients as Nickelodeon, Hustler, Mad, LA Weekly and elsewhere, his job/mission is to create laughter. Depending on your point of view, he is either a filth-obsessed pervo smut-monger or a social iconoclast using the same tactics as Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks to assault the worst and most hidebound aspects of society.

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

Ryan dubs his stinging graphic assaults on American culture ‘misanthropic comics’ and one of the most effective and honestly engaging is a simple riff on kids and fighting…

Ryan is a cartoonist with an uncompromising vision and an insatiable desire to shock and revolt whenever he wants to. In his ongoing Prison Pit series he perpetually pushes the graphic narrative envelope and the outer limits of taste with a brutal, primitive cascade of casual violence that has sprung, fangs bared, claws extended and arcanely barbed genitalia fully brandished, from his apparent obsession with casual ultra-violence, social decay and the mythology of masked wrestling. He is also a delighted devotee of the “berserk” manga strips of Kentaro Miura…

In the first volume criminal grappler Cannibal F***face (my asterisks not his) was banished to an extra-dimensional purgatory where the most violent felons from all over creation were dumped to live or die by societies which had outgrown the need for them. This barren hell-scape was littered with grotesque monsters, vile organisms and the worst specimens of humanity ever captured by the forces of civilisation. The masked wrestler was dumped there to fight and die, but his indomitable spirit and brutally battered body became bonded to a ghastly parasite, and together they thrived by killing everyone – and thing – they encountered…

In this fourth fearsome monochrome tome – which opens with the eighth uncanny episode of the unflinching epic – C.F. and his savage, semi-sentient new left arm awake in a crystalline cell and are informed they are imprisoned within the psychic confines of the insidious Caligulon. When the parasite abandons and attacks the wrestler, the result is an even more horrific monster and a temporary alliance which sees the brutal end of the mental wizards who form the ‘Brain Bitch’.

After demolishing, destroying and even consuming their foes and then dealing so-very-harshly with still more perilously paranormal priapic horrors, C.F. and his erstwhile ally turn on each other in ‘Slugstaxx’. After a horrendous clash which sees the unruly parasite devolved and returned to his rightful left arm-stump, the mighty masked wrestler then totally – and literally – screws with the massive computer behind his latest trials and returns to the Hadean wilderness where he then meets a roving band of marauding killers and proves to their juggernaut leader ‘Undigestible Scrotum’ that he was nothing of the kind…

Suddenly a strange flying machine begins to rain down devastating terror from above…

To Be Continued – and you can’t stop it…

In this non-stop welter of exceedingly excessive force, vile excrescences, constant combat challenges, scatological salvoes and sheer unadulterated graphic carnage, the never-ending Darwinian struggle of C.F. – forever beyond the reach of hope or rescue but never, ever contemplating surrender – is a macabre yet beguiling, loathsomely intriguing miracle of cartoon exuberance.

Man’s oldest gynophobic horrors and most simplistic delight in sheer physical dominance are savagely delineated in this primitive, appalling, cathartic and blackly funny campaign of comic horror. Resplendent, triumphant juvenilia has been adroitly shoved beyond all ethical limits into the darkest depths of absurdist comedy. This is another non-stop rollercoaster of brain-blistering action, profound, profanity and pictorial Sturm und Drang at its most gorge-rising and compelling: a never-ending battle delivered in the raw, frenetically primitivist ink-stained stabbings of an impassioned, engrossed child…

Not for kids, the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, here is extreme cartooning at its most visceral and pure.

…And now that we’ve placated the intellectual/moral imperative inside us all, I’ll also confirm that this book is another, all-out, over the top, indisputably hilarious hoot. Buy it and see if you’re broad-minded, fundamentally honest and purely in need of ultra-adult silliness…
© 2012 Johnny Ryan. All rights reserved.

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Transposes


By Dylan Edwards (Northwest Press)
ISBN: 978-0-9845940-8-5

I don’t hold many unflinching beliefs; but one of the few is that I, you and certainly no church, government or pressure group has any damn right to dictate what consenting adults do with or to their bodies. I may reserve the right to privately snigger at some of the more ambitious things people get up to in order to get their rocks off, but I can’t help that: after all I’ve lived through Flower Power, Free Love, New Men, flares (twice) and an era when both religions and politicians tolerated gays and evolution, and believed women were equal to men.

I’m more than happy for anybody to assign, clarify or reassign their gender identity as they see fit, and as for when “Life begins” and what you’re born as, I’m far more concerned by the fact that the most vocal advocates “know” exactly when, what and how it begins whilst it’s inside a human but feel no compunction or duty of care for any baby – or mother’s – wellbeing as soon as the (still developing until age 30) agglomeration of cells is out of the womb and into the world…

Whilst we’re sharing I also feel we should probably all pass an exam before we’re allowed to vote or voice an opinion…

There are a lot of acronyms here and I’m not going to play translator or decoder interminably, so if we miss linking any just use that search engine OK? This is comics, not University Challenge…

LGBT comics have long been the best place in the graphic narrative business to portray real romance: an artefact, I suppose, of a society that seems determined to establish sex and love as two utterly separate beasts. I’d still love to think that in the 21st century we’ve all outgrown the juvenile, judgemental bad old days and can simply appreciate powerful, moving and funny comics about people of all sorts without any kind of preconception…

Unless we’re talking girl/vampire/werewolf menageries a trois: that stuff is just plain wrong…

The very fact of being judged “different” now seems to be an increasingly common badge of courage in a world where fanatics and bigots become daily more rabid, and actual religious leaders can claim with straight faces that God so hates homosexuals and fornicators (or atheists or scientists or Ginger-haired, left-handed people) that in His wisdom He sends hundreds of tornados and tsunamis every year to wreck the homes of the faithful and worshipful – presumably because they ain’t doin’ nothin’ ’bout it…

Dylan Edwards, AKA NDR, is a graphic artist, cartoonist and sculptor: author of Politically InQueerect, sports strip The Outfield and many others, plus the creator of really cute monsters (as seen on his Feeping Creatures site), and in Transposes uses comics to celebrate the history of seven ordinary souls just living their lives as FTMs (females transitioning to males).

Dylan – who extensively interviewed each star before crafting these elucidating mini-epics – encapsulates their unconventional existences for the wider world with disarming candour and certified charm. Of course, all the “hot button issues” touted by a hypocritically moralising media (coming out, bullying, role models, gay identity, promiscuity vs. monogamy, childhood sexual abuse, risky sex and/or partners, STIs, parental approval and rejection) are present here – which only goes to show just how widespread and universal those perennial difficulties are…

Regardless of that, this collection comes off as a wonderfully positive and affirming chronicle celebrating determination and difference and, after an effusive and informative Introduction by Alison Bechdel (cartoonist, author of Fun Home and Are You My Mother? and deviser of the truly inspirational Bechdel test), there’s an engaging comic strip Foreword by storymaker Dylan Edwards explaining the process that led to the impressive pictorial reportage that follows.

Delivered with jokey aplomb, this savvy and smart ice-breaker gently eases the uninitiated into issues of transgender, cisgender and that subset-within-a-subset defined here as “queer-identified female-to-male-transpersons” before the terrific tale-spinning begins…

Over coffee ‘Cal’ tells of his trip to physically hook-up with an adventurously like-minded internet contact and how it all led to a few surprises, a whole new set of skills and a great story to dine off for months to come…

The gloriously hilarious ‘Henry’ scrupulously – even compulsively – recorded every aspect of his satisfyingly unconventional life and was quite content to share insights and horror stories from the astoundingMuseum ofNatural Henry…

Confusion and insecurity were a way of life for ‘Adam’ until he met Marni, who after an intense and nurturing time helped her beau discover that she really wasn’t the girl for him, whilst for ‘Blake’ an intoxicating brief encounter led to unexpected and life-long repercussions.

Scholarly, happily-in-control ‘Avery’ learned his greatest lessons early from an intolerant father and the wise, understanding and joyously gay uncle the family had ostracised, after which the cavalcade of human drama ends with a gloriously moving, entwined tale of two young outsiders simply destined for each other in the parallel-lives journey of ‘Aaron & James’ ending our odyssey on a fabulous, happy high note…

We are then comfortingly caught-up by a brief Epilogue in which all the participants are revisited and updated on life since their interviews to re-emphasise that feeling of pleasing continuance…

Comics as a medium is already a symbolically active one, honed and irresistibly one-step-removed from the mundane faux reality of film or photography. As such its powers to skin away confusing or misleading surface and reveal unalloyed intent and meaning are without parallel.

Don’t take my word for it. Check out any political caricature by Hogarth, Scarfe or Steve Bell…

It’s an admission of annoying embarrassment to me that I’ve felt compelled to put in so much equivocating background and bumph before coming to the meat of this review. In the final analysis Transposes is a subtly sensitive, evocative, romantic and humorously rewarding collection of “people stories” which any open-minded fan will adore. There’s not much fighting but plenty of punch, and in an ideal world this book would be readily available in every school library for any confused kid in need of inspiration, comfort, understanding, encouragement and hope.

Sadly because it deals openly with sex and gender, it’s probably going to be banned in more than half the United States and get pilloried in our free and impartial Press… Well, if nothing else the publicity will be very useful in ensuring that the folk who need to get to hear of it…
© 2012 Dylan Edwards. All rights reserved.

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Kennedy – the President Must Die!


By artists unknown, cover by Prieto Muriana (Morcrim International Publications)
No ISBN: 84-400-2535-1

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty” – John Fitzgerald Kennedy

We couldn’t possibly do a week of political packages without dipping into a little sordid scandal or tawdry muckraking and with Kennedy – The President Must Die! I think we’ve found an indisputably appalling candidate…

In the 1970’s Mercocomics were a short-lived Spanish outfit (1977-1978) that produced a number of violent and titillating adult soft-core shockers which were translated into English and unleashed on the British public just as that dire decade was lurching to a close and Punk Rock could be heard echoing out of every Sixth Form Common Room. Amongst their some 117 published monochrome digest issues were such eye-catching titles as Hitler, Che, Sade, Lucrecia, Don Juan – Tenorio Garcia, El Socialista, Cronica Negra, Quixote ’78 , Mussolini and a 6-part sleazy fictionalised expose of the events of the Kennedy Assassination.

Much of the material was picked up from other Shlock publishers – particularly Italian horror comics – and made it into re-translations all over Europe. As far as I know, the Kennedy series only turned up in French and the English edition under review here, and I’m assuming from the quirky pacing, non-stop hops into salacious nudity and Carry-On Movie sex and anonymous art style that it too was Italian in origin…

This first gratuitous episode opens as a Texasmillionaire “patriot” hires ex-CIA operative and dirty tricks specialist Michael Fairchild for a very special freelance job that will save the nation from ruin. Meanwhile in Washington DC, JFK’s FBI procurer informs the leader of New Camelot that his latest assignation is naked, willing and hot to trot downstairs. Perfect wife Jackie is not fooled by her husband’s half-hearted excuses either…

In Dallas, minor crime-boss and nightclub proprietor Jack Ruby is auditioning new “hostesses” when old associate Fairchild turns up looking for a credible patsy. Ruby thinks he knows just the guy: a loser named Lee Harvey Oswald…

The dirty tricks master knows Oswald is a double agent – actually a CIA man on the skids and trapped in a dead end surveillance mission – but with what he’s planning, that just makes him an ideal scapegoat…

When he was stationed in Russia, Oswald married Marina Prussakova, but since coming to America she’s been neglecting him for the devious, deviant Mrs. Payne…

Preparations for the mission continue in secret. Out in the desert beyond Dallas, two snipers hone their skills in complete privacy, whilst in DC Robert Kennedy again warns his brother of the dangers of visiting that city at this time. Sadly the President is more concerned with his latest dalliances than the details of his trip, and soon even his perfect First Lady can’t take anymore …

The plot inexorably progresses and on November 22nd 1963 the conflicted and nonplussed Oswald somehow finds himself in an office of the Texas School Book Depository overlookingDealeyPlaza with the Presidential limousine in his sights. Trapped by his own insecurity and isolation from his Federal superiors, the undercover American agent is about to become the most reviled killer in US history.

Two shots ring out in rapid succession but Oswald’s finger is not on his rifle trigger…

Packed with actual historical personages and always skating perilously close to libel, this is indisputably a sleazy, unintentionally hilarious conspiracy thriller, yet somehow it all manages to pull together the mythology of assassination with surprising power and conviction. I’ve read far worse stories and dafter theories on the subject from legitimate experts, but frankly the art isn’t that great here and quite honestly the sheer volume of voluptuous, naked – and poorly drawn – jiggy bits is something of an unwelcome distraction.

So bad it’s good or simply unforgivable? …You decide, after all, it’s only your vote that counts…
© Mercocomic 1977-1978

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The Adventures of Tintin – Breaking Free


By J. Daniels (Attack International/Freedom Press)
ISBNs: 0-9514261-0-9,      978-0-9514261-0-4,        978-1-90449-117-0 (Freedom Press)

“Freedom of the Press is only guaranteed to those who own one” – Abbott Joseph Liebling

Politics is always composed of and used by firebrands and coldly calculating grandees, but that’s the only guiding maxim you can trust. Most other people don’t give a toss until it affects them in the pocket and, no matter to what end of the political spectrum one belongs, the greatest enemy of the impassioned ideologue is apathy. This forces activists and visionaries to ever-more devious and imaginative stunts and tactics…

Crafted by the enigmatically anonymous J. Daniels and concocted and released by the anarchist faction Attack International in 1988, The Adventures of Tintin – Breaking Free is a perfect exercise in the use of Détournement (“turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself”), using mimicry, mockery, parody and satire to counter the seductive subversion of the Monied Interests of the status quo.

It also reads rather well as social documentary and human drama, for all its earnest worthiness and fiercely dogmatic posturing…

The gimmick is this: the comforting cosy style and iconic images of Hergé’s immortal adventurers are removed into our pedestrian oppressive, corrupt world and co-opted to incite a revolution in thinking and action…

In Chapter 1, ‘We’ve Had Enough!’ has unemployed hothead, petty thief and disenfranchised youthful dole-queue outcast Tintin visit his uncle on the run-down-and-dying council estate where the once-vital man and his wife Mary now live on the breadline. The boy needs money and The Captain suggests a labouring job with him on the new building site. Although there’s work to be had, tensions are high there: dangerous working conditions, shoddy management practices and subsistence wages for the desperate men crafting luxury flats for more of the rich and gentrified types steadily pushing real people out of the community…

Another alienated faction joins the swell of discontent when squatters break in to the flat next door and the Captain helps them sort out the utilities. Everybody knows the council is letting the estate die of neglect so that the corrupt councillors can sell it off, so the lesbian activists are welcomed as fellow fighters against the powers that be.

Tensions mount as the National Front recruit in broad daylight, skinheads carry out racist attacks and yuppie winebars push out good old-fashioned working-men’s pubs. Soon Tintin is striking back whenever he can: vandalising posh cars and pickpocketing rich poseurs. All proper men need is jobs, beer, football and a decent life, but the boy soon has his eyes opened – if not his opinions changed – when he is made painfully aware of how even those lower class paragons treat their women…

Events come to a head when a worker dies on the building site and the supervisor is more concerned about lost time; even suggesting poor Joe Hill was drunk and not the hapless victim of negligent, non-existent safety procedures…

‘One Out, All Out!’ sees a wildcat strike seeking compensation for Joe’s widow escalate into a national furore after trade union officials strike a shady deal with the property developers and the incensed workers reject their useless official action for measures that will actually work.

Soon bosses and unions are conspiring together to break the unsanctioned, unofficial action as the ordinary people rally around the strikers, providing food, money and – most important of all – encouragement.

Soon the authorities resort to their tried and true dirty tactics: picket-breaking riot squads, undercover agent provocateurs, intelligence-led targeted arrests of “ringleaders” and general, brutal intimidation.

Scab labour is harshly dealt with in ‘Let’s Get Organised’ as the hard-working, underappreciated women increasingly take up the challenge. The movement is growing in strength and national support. Soon other cities are in revolt too, and The Captain is becoming an unwilling and unlikely figurehead. Tintin, ever impatient, finds like-minded hotheads and secretly begins a campaign of literally explosive sabotage…

It all culminates in ‘Getting Serious’ as everything kicks into overdrive when the Captain endures a punishment beating from unidentified thugs and his family is similarly threatened. Scared but undeterred, the old salt carries on, and planning for a national march continues unabated. With reports coming in of similar movements inPoland,Yugoslavia and other Warsaw Pact countries (the Soviet Empire was still very much in existence and continually crushing workers’ freedoms at this time) the local groundswell becomes a national expression of solidarity and the underclass consolidates under a mass rallying call to arms…

When the riot squads are again deployed it all turns ugly and the events go global, but in the aftermath The Captain has been “disappeared” or, as the authorities would have it, been “arrested for conspiracy”.

With half a million people on the streets of the city, the powers-that-be move to full military response but it’s too late…

The later edition, published by Freedom Press in 2011, also includes the infamous early adventures of this extremely alternative Tintin (as first seen in polemical pamphlet The Scum in 1986) from the scallywag’s days sorting out Rupert Murdoch from the picket line at Wapping during the legendary Printer’s Strike…

Passionate and fiercely idealistic, the initial release of Breaking Free unsurprisingly unleashed a storm of howling protest from the establishment, Tory Press and tabloid papers (especially News International) and by all accounts even Prime Minister Thatcher was “utterly revolted”.

Of course that only meant that the little guys had won: achieving a degree of publicity and notoriety such puny, powerless underdogs could only have dreamed of but never afforded by any traditional means of disseminating their message…

More a deliciously tempting dream than a serious clarion call to end social injustice, this is a wickedly barbed and superbly well-intentioned piece, lovingly capturing the sublime Ligne Claire style and utterly redirecting its immense facility to inform and beguile…

First released in April 1988 by Attack International. This book proudly proclaims that no copyright has been invoked unless capitalists want to poach it…

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Apes of Wrath


By Steve Bell (Methuen in association with The Guardian)
ISBN: 978-0-41377-450-7

For as long as we’ve had printing in this country we’ve had gadfly artists commentating on society and its iniquities, and visually haranguing the powerful, pompous, privileged and just plain perfidious through swingeing satire and cunning cartoons.

Even after many centuries of savage satirical Masters, we’re still throwing up brilliant firebrands and cruelly artistic geniuses whose political acumen, societal consciences and staggering graphic gifts irresistibly combine to make the powerful, unscrupulous and hypocritically venal sweat a bit in their own self-important juices whilst making we mere rabble of hoi-polloi and avowed plebs chuckle and smirk at their revealed discomforts…

Probably the most effective and dedicated of the modern crop of cartoonist champions of the underclass (or “the public” as I call them) is Steve Bell, who has been skewering the Great and the not-so Good since 1977.

Born in Walthamstow in 1951, raised in Sloughand North Yorkshireand educated at Teeside College of Art, the Universities of Leeds and later Exeter(where he obtained a teaching qualification from St. Luke’s Campus), he abandoned education for freelance art as both comics artist (the Gremlins in Jackpot) and cartoonist.

His strident, polemical strips ‘Maggie’s Farm’ (Time Out and City Limits) and ‘Lord God Almighty’ in The Leveller led to a commission from The Clash for the album Sandanista! and eventually his own regular feature ‘If…’ which began in national newspaper The Guardian in 1981 and is still going hard and strong…

It’s a controversial maxim of political cartooning that you’re only as good as the times you’re in and the targets on offer, but if so either Bell has been born into the End of Days or he’s particularly blessed in having a perpetually renewing procession of perfectly risible prime lampooning targets – or maybe that should be “suspects”…

After lambasting a succession of utterly ghastly Tory leaders and their appalling acolytes at home, and rabid Rightist rulers abroad for years, blow me if a global swing to the left didn’t seemingly leave Bell with nothing to shoot at. However it all soon proved to be a false alarm which offered a new American C-i-C with his own on-board, self-destructive arsenal of gaffes and a covert continuation of Conservative idiocy ideology at home with the election of Labour’s Saviour Tony Blair.

And then in 2000, the Nicedaysmerca and birthplace of Freem even found itself another Bush to hide in front of…

Collecting and repurposing comical cutlass-slashes, surgically sardonic scalpel-cuts, a riot of rapier-like witticisms and, when nothing else will do, the occasional bludgeon with the blunt-end of a cartoon cudgel, this crushingly hilarious  full-colour  – and often off-colour – compendium collects Guardian cartoons from 1988, 1991 and 1998-2004, tracing the rise of the Bush Dynasty in war and profit peace, without ever underplaying the key role played by dogged Little Britain in assuring a nice steady pace on the road to mutually-assured Armageddon…

The grand conceit of this savage little hardcover treat is that we get to peek beneath the hem of great men in a time of turrble crisis where Freeman Moxy were threatened and only the Curge of our leaders kept us all from  being wiped out by Slamic Fananimalism and Terrrsts. Moreover we get to hear it all in the humble words of George Dubya Bush as he recounts his role in countering the crisis…

Featuring 110 wickedly manic graphic salvoes against just about everybody and a few utterly damning moral condemnations as only arch cartoonists can concoct them, Apes of Wrath captures the true spirit of those troubled times with such standout pictorialised diatribes as ‘Bigtime for Bonzo’, ‘Electile Dysfunction’, ‘Al Who’da??’, ‘The Age of Irony is Dead…’, ‘Corporate Responsibility’, ‘The Humanitarian Thrust Continues’ and so many more…

Thoughtfully containing a comprehensive glossary of frequently-used terms such as “Morl Curge” (What you need to be a wurl class wurl leader), “Cladral damage” (What happens to pain in the ass innocent bystanders that don’t keep their heads down) and “Diplocrap” (talking to forners) which will help us all speak Presidentially and understand the complexity of high level negotiation, this chronicle of catastrophe is a perfectly guided missile of agonised, mordant mirth that no as-yet free-thinking individual should miss, especially as elections just keep on happening…
Text © 2004 Steve Bell. Illustrations © 1988, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Steve Bell. All rights reserved.

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Ralph Azham volume 1: Why Would You Lie to Someone You Love?

By Lewis Trondheim, coloured by Brigitte Findakly and translated by Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-593-8

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: one for the boys and girls who grew up but never stopped imagining… 8/10

With over 100 books bearing his pen-name (his secret identity is actually Laurent Chabosy), writer/artist/editor and educator Lewis Trondheim is one of Europe’s most prolific comics creators: illustrating his own work, overseeing animated cartoons of adaptations of previous successes such as La Mouche (The Fly) and Kaput and Zösky or editing the younger-readers book series Shampooing for Dargaud.

His most famous tales are such global hits as ‘Les Formidables Aventures de Lapinot’ (translated as The Spiffy Adventures of McConey), (with Joann Sfar) the Donjon series of nested fantasy epics (translated here as the conjoined sagas Dungeon: Parade, Dungeon: Monstres and Dungeon: the Early Years) and his utterly beguiling cartoon diaries sequence Little Nothings.

In his spare time, and when not girdling the globe from convention to symposium to festival, the dourly shy and neurotically introspective savant has written for satirical magazine Psikopat and provided scripts for many of the continent’s most popular artists such as Fabrice Parme (Le Roi Catastrophe, Vénézia), Manu Larcenet (Les Cosmonautes du futur), José Parrondo (Allez Raconte and Papa Raconte) and Thierry Robin (Petit Père Noël).

Trondheimis a cartoonist of uncanny wit, outrageous imagination, piercing perspicacity, comforting affability and self-deprecating empathy who prefers to scrupulously control what is known and said about him…

His latest English language project (originally released by Belgian outfit Éditions Dupuis in 2001) returns to the realm of anthropomorphic fantasy in a saga designed as six volumes of wryly cynical faux-heroism revolving around failed Messiah and all-around disappointment Ralph Azham.

In his mountainous rural village, teenaged slacker Ralph is barely tolerated. He’s lazy, rude to his elders, constantly flouts authority, is always mouthing off and perpetually gets into trouble. Moreover when he turned blue on the Night of the Double Moon – a certain sign of magical powers and an indicator that one may be the long-awaited Chosen One – he subsequently failed the tests of The Envoy and was ignominiously returned to the village.

Now he’s just an obnoxious waste of space whose only gift is the unnerving ability to tell when someone is pregnant or going to die…

The desolate village is slowly expiring too. Situated in a depressing gully and old riverbed, the place comprises barely a dozen families now; the hard subsistence toil gradually forcing the farmers to emigrate to the less hostile but crowded lowlands. Also, with the annual visit from the rapacious marauding barbarian horde forever looming, the place has precious little comfort or security to offer the dour citizens.

When the elders send Ralph out on a useless herb-gathering mission so they can have a council meeting without his annoying presence, the pariah is accosted by coquettish, scheming Claire who tries to seduce him and make him take her away from it all. After all, a boy with his gifts could surely make some money in the civilised parts of the world…

Ralph spurns her and returns to eavesdrop on the village meeting, but when she follows and forcefully tries again, her big brother Piatch observes everything and attacks in a vain effort to defend her long-spent honour. The running fight crashes through the village and many of the indignant elders join in. When the well-thrashed Ralph furiously exposes many of their marital secrets he finds himself confined to the pigsty for two months by the shamed and outraged citizens…

Later that night his long-suffering father Bastien passes Ralph food and a knife, sadly recalling those distant days when the entire populace thought the boy was their literal ticket to salvation. After all, when the Chosen One was finally found, his mighty powers would totally destroy the terrible threat of predatory conqueror Vom Syrus and save the entire nation.

The whole episode was ill-starred. On their last night together, father and son were trapped in a cave-in and Ralph discovered his unsettling but militarily useless power. Even after they escaped death by suffocation, the airborne pilgrimage to fabled Astolia went tragically wrong – just how bad only Bastien knew for certain – and when the boy was returned to the village the populace’s high expectations soon soured.

They’d been taking it out on Ralph ever since…

In the pigpen Claire tries once more to sway the fed-up and furious boy wonder, but he’s already declined one attempt to help him escape. Wastrel Ralph has no intention of ever leaving his doting dad. Later as Bastien quizzes him on why he’s still there the alarm is sounded. The horde is near…

The village is perfectly divided. Exactly half want to fight whilst the others favour abject surrender and throwing themselves on the invaders’ mercies. Unbelievably, now they desperately need Ralph to settle matters as the tie-breaking vote. The outcast is utterly unable to ignore the irony or resist the temptation to make them all squirm, but he is distracted by the ailing Filbert kid. The lad isn’t very well and it is another night of the Double Moon…

When the militant faction proves to be the most determined to win and acquiesces to Ralph’s outrageous and humiliating demands the vote is cast and the villagers begin building a huge deadfall trap to kill as many Horde raiders as possible, guided by the pariah’s father who was once a military engineer.

As the labours progress, further hidden secrets of Ralph’s interesting time in Astolia are revealed, but even as the weary folk return to their homes the trap is sprung: not by the invaders but rather one of their own.

Sore loser Mortimer knew that only he was right and thus couldn’t abide by the results of the vote…

In the cascade of rocks little Raoul Filbert was injured and as the enraged mob hunt for the new village pariah, forgotten Ralph carries the wounded child to the wise woman Auntie Milla. As she tends to the lad something happens to Ralph too. Soon he realises that his powers have changed and he can see dead people…

When he meets his father he realises that the ghost of the Envoy from his long-ago journey is attached to Bastien and soon the awful  truth of his boyhood trip to Astolia comes tumbling out…

Milla too was part of the conspiracy, and now that Ralph knows the horrible, selfish cause for his years of abuse and ostracization he severs all ties with his father. Suddenly the alarm sounds and the old soldier rushes back to the village where the horde has arrived. Dejected Ralph picks up the sleeping Raoul and follows, but in the dark nobody has noticed that the little lad’s head has turned blue…

In a wild and cataclysmic display of arcane power Raoul destroys half the village and routs the panicked barbarians, but once they have recovered their wits the Horde outriders give chase. However when the azure couple are cornered, Ralph’s new gift and the spirits of the pursuers’ previous victims combine to save them both, before a final cataclysm erupts and wipes out the invaders and most of the village too…

After one final fractious confrontation with the surviving elders, Ralph heads for the plains and summons the latest Astolian Envoy to take him and Raoul to the city where the new Chosen One can be trained. However, as they prepare to take off on the civil servant’s triple-headed winged reptile, Claire rushes up, demanding to join them.

She feels she has the right since her cat ears and tiger stripes have turned a vibrant shade of blue…

Mesmerising and superbly enjoyable, this unfolding epic features a truly intriguing and clay-footed hero in a fantastic world of regrettably shallow and typically callous everyday folk, venal, self-serving and barely worth saving even if a Messiah can be found…

This engagingly sly and witty fantasy adventure tale for grown-ups begins here in a 96-page, full-colour landscape (218x168mm) sturdy hardcover edition and promises to become another must-not-miss epic masterpiece from one of the world’s greatest comic geniuses.

Contents © DUPUIS 2001 byTrondheim. All rights reserved. This edition © 2012 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

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You’ll Never Know Book 3: Soldier’s Heart


By C. Tyler (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-588-8

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: an ideal example of Art for Our Sake… 10/10

In 2009 illustrator, educator, performer and occasional cartoonist Carol Tyler (The Job Thing, Late Bloomer) published the first of a trilogy of graphic memoirs examining her tempestuous relationship with her father. Chuck, a veteran of World War II and by all measures A Good and Decent Man, had been a mystery and painful cipher to his girl for years but everything changed one day in 2002.

After six decades of brusque taciturnity and scarily obsessive sublimating self-reliance, during which he had edited his service career out of his life, Chuck suddenly and explosively opened up about his time in Africa and Europe. However, he would not or could not recall his later experiences in Italy and France as the War staggered to a close…

Disease and growing infirmity had suddenly produced in her once strong-but-distant father a terrifying openness and desire to share his long-suppressed war experiences and history.

As if suddenly speaking for an entire generation who fought and died or survived and somehow soldiered on as civilians in a society with no conception of Post Traumatic Stress Disorders, Chuck Tyler began to unburden his soul.

Galvanised and hungry to learn more, Carol began creating an album of his army years but soon came up against a mental blank-period: one for which no corroborating records existed. For, as much as he could effusively recall, there was so much more that had been excised from Chuck’s mind and apparently erased by the government…

It became a quest: a relentless search for hidden truths which abruptly collapsed when the irritably mutable elder suddenly turned on her and the painful, frustrating search for the past.

In 2010, second volume Collateral Damage was released and found Carol coping with her own husband Justin‘s infidelities, mental dilemmas, betrayal and desertion. This led to a resumption of the father-and-daughter recording and re-ordering of Chuck’s recollections of Italy and France (including the infamous Battle of the Bulge) whilst re-examining her own agonisingly chaotic, self-destructive existence and hidden demons.

Carol was forced to examine her troubled past through a new lens. How much did growing up the child of a devoted, loving husband who was incomprehensibly somehow a coldly, unapproachable father, shape her own parade of life-errors and marital mishaps?

Could she prevent her increasingly wild daughter Julia from perpetuating the cycle by making the same bad choices she had?

As her parents’ physical and mental states inexorably deteriorated, Chuck had become obsessed by the mystery of the missing months he’d forgotten and a potential “Government Pay-out”. In his more open and lucid moments he gratefully accepted Carol’s aid in trying to solve the dilemma and so the pair began to explore numerous Federal and Veteran’s Administrative archives and resources…

During an increasingly critical reappraisal of the family’s shared experiences, Carol subsequently discovered how her mother Hannah or “Red” had coped with dark tragedies and suppressed secrets on the Home Front, and gained enhanced perspective but no satisfactory answers to the continuing conundrum of her father.

Rushing to finish her self-appointed task of turning her father’s life into a comprehensible chronicle whilst her parents both visibly declined with every visit, Carol’s personal life was also becoming uncontrollable and too much to endure…

Exploring three generations of a family born out of collateral damage and which never truly escaped WWII, the saga concludes with the revelatory breakthrough moments of Soldier’s Heart, opening with a moving visual introduction by Carol and Red before revealing how Julia’s spiralling behavioural  problems brought a chastened and resolutely repentant Justin back into the fold. Julia’s troubles prove to have a biological and psychological basis and, whilst Justin came back into their lives, he never made it to Carol’s bed. As the once-marrieds moved into a new holding pattern, the cartoonist’s military searches brought her to the actual man of her dreams but family loyalty kept him from her too…

With ‘The Mind’ awhirl Carol found solace and renewed balance by adopting a miraculous dog before embarking on a frighteningly close shave involving Chuck, a gun and a mouse in ‘The X-mas Tale’ whilst New Year ruminations on the price soldiers always pay and how we honour the fallen in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Walking the Mat’ bring the pensive and elegiac narrative to ‘Dad’s Army Scrapbook and Tour of Duty Highlights part V: Rhineland Dec. 1944-Mar. 1945’…

Here at last the researches find a crucial turning point as Chuck’s broken memories and the records pinpoint a discrepancy – although the old soldier’s recall describes his duties and exploits up to March when he was sent home, the files show that he didn’t get back to America again until November…

Further investigations and a growing network of helpful contacts lead them towards the National Archives Personnel Records Center in St. Louis and Carol resolves to take her folks on an epic road trip to Missouri. Although personally revelatory, the excursion turns into a frustrating bureaucratic nightmare in ‘Prairie Trek by Truck with Hannah and Chuck’ and advances the Tour of Duty Scrapbook not one jot.

Now the project’s very last hope is a ‘Trip to the National Archives and WWII Memorial – Washington, D.C. 2004’ but the journey is almost finished before it’s begun when Chuck’s latest home-improvement project turns the family home into an asbestos-soaked  death-trap and the old man’s toxic other self resurfaces.

With relations between father and daughter at their lowest ebb for years, the Washington excursion begins with little hope for success but leads unbelievably to a spectacular and moving breaking of the mental dam and subsequent epiphany of shocking proportions…

The story doesn’t end there but moves on to re-begin for the Tyler clan and there’s still one last moving ‘Epilogue’ before the close of this very special, grimly life-affirming account.

Ruminative, pensive and moodily elegiac with a series of stunning set-piece illustrations eerily reminiscent of American master of stoic isolation Edward Hopper blending into a mixed palette of cartooning and illustration disciplines, C. Tyler’s art adroitly mirrors her eclectic, entrancing non-sequential story-form, with a beguiling, bewildering array of styles meshing perfectly and evocatively to create a fully immersive comics experience.

Offering warmth, heartbreak, horror, humour, angst, tragedy, triumph and hope in a seductive display simultaneously charming and devastatingly effective, this grand narrative is itself constructed like a photo album (hardback, landscape and copiously expansive at 310x265mm) redefining the eternal question “How and Why Do Families Work?”

The mystery of the Soldier’s Heart is a magnificent conclusion to Tyler’s triptych of discovery and one no lover of comics or student of the human condition should miss.

© 2012 C. Tyler. All rights reserved.

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Life Through the Lens


By Kent Olson & Sabine Ten Lohuis
No ISBN:

One of the greatest things about comics is the simple, overwhelming fact that you don’t need the riches of Croesus and a cast of thousands to produce an effective and even top-rate creative outcome. As a means of delivering drama, comedy, passion, heartbreak and spectacle, nothing tops sequentially arranged words and pictures on a flat surface.

With such a plastic medium there’s literally no tale that can’t be told – and at the exact undiluted pace and intensity the authors intended, with no interference from bean counters, hucksters, Health and Safety cops or the laws of physics.

The first part of a much larger tale, Life Through the Lens is a slim but fascinating self-published work by Philosophy and Film School graduate Kent Olsen and artist Sabine Ten Lohuis created with the aid of a grant from the Kamloops, British Columbia Film Society that seeks to examine the role of the addictive power of fiction in a world of mere reality…

You’d think that money, success, public approbation, a wonderland of drugs and a string of compliant, willing women would be enough for most men, but TV movie pundits Richard Winston and Jerald Freestone are painfully hungry for more: something ineffable and unobtainable….

In Chicago as one year ends and the next begins, the great friends saturate themselves again with sex, drugs and films old and new, inarticulately wishing they were there and dreading that life and the future only holds more of the same…

That increasingly aching creative void is slowly poisoning their lives. Richard and Jerald are only enthralled and engaged when absorbed in other peoples’ fictional realities, and only come alive when furiously debating the meaning and merit of what they’re watching.

In this arena – and usually in front of adoring small screen masses – they release their true selves: Richard the academic intellectual Ego, viewing everything through layers of organisation and the heartfelt accepted wisdoms of others, whilst raw, unschooled Jerald is all Id, allowing his visceral instinctual first response full rein over his critical sensibilities.

As their miserable success inexorably leads to greater excess, their unyielding friendship draws them deeper into an inescapable, shared yet polarised passion. Tragically there’s no cue for a stabilising, moralising Super Ego on their celluloid horizons…

To Be Continued…

Teasing and tantalising, valuing subtlety over splashy booms or bangs and carefully pacing itself to create the maximum tension – even in the midst of the moving buddy-movie moments – this is an intriguing and superbly inviting walk off comics’ beaten track that will hopefully find an age-appropriate audience far above and beyond its self-admitted crossover film-fan target market.
No copyright or trademark so let’s assume Story © 2012 Kent Olsen & Illustrations © 2012 Sabine Ten Lohuis until advised otherwise. All rights reserved.

Copies of an extremely limited run are available from the marvellous High Octane Comics and Collectables in Kamloops if you’re ever in the vicinity, or direct from Kent Olsen via cheque or paypal ($8 in Canada, or $10 US, which I suspect includes shipping) with further details obtainable by contacting blankpaint@gmail.com or through Sabine’s lovely webpage at http://tenlohuis.com/