Category: Mature Reading

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Everything Together – Collected Stories


By Sammy Harkham (Picturebox)
ISBN: 978-0-98515-950-4

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: the only gift a real comics lover will need this year… 9/10

Some cartoonists, like some rock-stars, movie-makers – and indeed exponents of every art-form – make big headlines and meteorically hit the public attention early in their careers whilst others soldier on in the background, relishing the untroubled obscurity and assiduously building a body of brilliant, well-regarded work that the even the shooting stars are envious of.

Such a creator is Sammy Harkham. Born in Los Angelesin 1980, he spent his teen-age years in Australiaand developed a pathological love of the comics medium which first surfaced after he created the astounding and multi-award winning anthology Kramers Ergot in the opening moments of the 21st century.

Since the 1980s, “Underground” creators and cartoonists of adult and mature English-language comics have begun to find mainstream and popular acceptance by re-branding themselves as alternative or Avant Garde: crafting European-style personal tales rather than chasing mass-entertainment goals.

Soon self-published mini-comics and fanzines were augmented if not supplanted by groundbreaking anthologies which served to disseminate the best of the best in challenging, no-holds-barred sequential art.

Following on the groundbreaking heels of Raw and its descendants, Kramers Ergot launched as a 48-page mini-comic in 2000. Harkham nurtured the publication over 8 years, as it evolved a vari-format, anything-goes visual and intellectual banquet equal-billing talented newcomers and many of the world’s greatest pencil-pushers old and new. In 2008, the hard-working editor suspended publication with #7 – a huge-scaled (536x414mm) 96-page deluxe hardback featuring 60 of the art-form’s most beguiling stars. Harkham recently returned to his billion megawatt baby with an 8th volume in 2011.

The occasional compendium offered to artists an utterly free intellectual outlet and more nurturing creative environment and featured superb works by a multitude of graphic storymakers, but was also an outlet for Harkham’s own fabulously eclectic and enthralling comic strips. Now his many of his sublimely rendered, addictively intriguing, creatively-inspirational cartoons stories are gathered in an entrancing softcover collection no mature aficionado should be without.

Everything Together comprises superbly challenging cartoon opuses and short pieces plus some quirky, ultra-brief vignettes, and the only grudging criticism I can offer is that some of the very best of them are printed, really, really small – but even that’s not an insurmountable problem since he’s an artist’s artist, capable of stunning line-economy and clear narrative and, as a bit of an old doodler too (quite, quite venerable, in fact), I possess a magnifying lens in my battered old art box…

Always a master of understated nuance and the necessarily unsaid, with an uncanny ability to find stories in any place, Harkham’s Finest Comics originally appeared in Vice, Mome, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, Kramers Ergot, Crickets and elsewhere, and kick off here with the quietly hilarious art-challenged world-conqueror and sup-par cartoonist ‘Napoleon!’

Next, Harkham deliciously demythologises the Biblical Jewish experience with the wry, dry ‘Elisha’ and then changes pace by packing in a bunch of those teeny-weeny tales on a single page of ‘Indicia Comics’ that includes Attack of the Frankensteins!, Cab Ride, Cartoonist, Pickton Grocery Line and more.

A longer exploration of life in South Australia in 1995 follows as bemused idle kid Iris fretfully whiles away another dull summer with cadged cigarettes, illicit booze, unwise boyfriends and basic buddy-bonding in the eerily laconic and mesmerising ‘Somersaulting’. Immediately after the uncompromising single-pager, ‘Mother Fucker’ focuses on a day-trip with Iris’s absentee dad and ‘Maximum Destruction’ offers a furiously delightful tribute to Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are…

Most of the stories are in assorted limited half-tones (black, white and another colour) but – and only when he thinks it appropriate – Harkham delves splendidly into his glorious full-spectrum palette, beginning with the idyllic ‘Knut Hamsen Dept:’ and the surreal desert crime caper ‘Give Up’ before concluding with the oddly lyrical ‘Golem Comics’.

In black and blue and white ‘Poor Sailor’ details how frustrated dreams, daily routine and dissatisfaction can destroy a perfect life, ‘Cartoonists in Cars’ provides a portmanteau of telling revelations and ‘Frank S. Santoro, Sr.’ details the non-events of a cold night in Pittsburgh.

A telling moment of domesticity and ancestral history is examined in the poor, hard-pressed Jewish Shtetl of ‘Lubavitch, Ukraine, 1876’ whilst contemporary ennui informs the creepy ‘Sitting Outside, Watching Baby’ after which ‘Free Comics’ bundles together another batch of spellbinding mini-cartoon moments such Gary Panter, I am Happy Every Moment of Every Day, Clowes + Huizenga, Pregnant Alley and this tantalising tome concludes with ‘The New Yorker Story’, a darkly enticing literary romance of diluted passion and ascendant aesthetics…

Punctuated with loads of evocative pin-ups and easily blending love, absurdity, mania, wry wit, hate, indifference, reportage, apathy, resignation, whimsy and honest hope when nothing else is left, Everything Together perfectly showcases the deep thought and carefully considered visual elucidation of a master craftsman whose renown is at last catching up with his diligence and sheer talent.
© 2012 S. Harkham. All rights reserved.
Everything Together is published in the UK on October 25th 2012

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Nextwave Agents of H.A.T.E. the Ultimate Collection


By Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen & Wade Von Grawbadger (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-4461-8

Even for the most dedicated fans, superhero comics can become a little samey and pedestrian, so when gifted big- name creators such as Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen decide to have a little fun with the fringes of such a ponderous continuity as Marvel’s, expectations are always understandably high.

In 2006 Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort) launched for a breathtaking and controversial 12 issue run and happily proved to be everything one could hope for…

Wry, cynically Post-Modern and malevolently mischievous, the saga borrowed shamelessly from kid’s bubblegum pop culture – especially trans-pacific animation (there was even a theme-song you could hear online and a variant issue readers could colour in to win prizes) – as well as the forgotten contents of the daftest corners of Marvel’s nigh-seventy years of existence to captivatingly satirise the genre, the medium and itself – and it was hilariously anti-globalisation, counter-Capitalist, rude, sexy and excessively ultra-violent…

H.A.T.E. is another of those numerous acronymic quasi-governmental, covert high-tech agencies dedicated to keeping us all safe in our overpriced, indolent beds – at least that was what their eccentric team of operatives initially believed.

When they discovered that their employers were in fact a fully owned subsidiary of the Beyond Corporation© and the latest iteration of diabolical terrorist cabal S.I.L.E.N.T., former Avengers Monica Rambeau (Captain Marvel II/Photon) and artificial individual Aaron (Machine Man) Stack rightly rebelled.

With ex-X-Man girl Tabitha Smith (Meltdown/Boom Boom), stroppy immortal monster-hunter Elsa Bloodstone and hyper-powered, unimaginative enigma The Captain (formerly Captain $#!£ until ostracized by all the other military-monickered mystery-men, after which Captain America punched his foul-mouthed head in and washed his mouth out with soap) in tow, they went AWOL, intending to stop their former paymasters at all costs.

Further investigation disclosed that the terrorist conglomerate was actually planning to product-test potentially lucrative BWMDs – Bizarre Weapons of Mass Destruction – on American soil and ordinary folks, so the shocked quintet promptly stole a super-ship and all the plans, determined to stop the callous campaign and take down the despicable Beyond©-ers forever…

With their increasingly deranged, suicidal and sexually outré former commander Dirk Anger in hot pursuit, the team begins its fightback in Abcess, North Dakota where the legendary giant dragon in underpants Fin Fang Foom has been awakened and… stimulated… into going on a rampage of destructive frustration…

On the streets of Abcess, hordes of Beyond©’s mass-produced vegetable warriors are attacking the citizenry and exacerbating the chaos until Elsa and The Captain intervene with their signature lack of restraint.

As property damage and general unrest spiral upwards, Monica devises an unsavoury plan and orders Aaron – a fantastic robot who despises human “fleshy ones” and has reprogrammed himself to crave vast amounts of beer – to get himself swallowed and deal with the dragon from the inside…

With no rest for the Wicked-crushers the renegade revengers then head to Sink City, Illinoiswhere brutally corrupt cop Mac Mangel has been infected with a mechanistically mutating program, transforming him into a colossal flesh and steel beast hungry to eat metal and children…

With mounting carnage everywhere, the Captain still gets distracted into an origin flashback, leaving Tabitha to deal with the Transfomer-ed Mangel in her stylishly simple yet permanent manner…

In Wyoming, the Nextwave discover a Beyond© War Garden and set about destroying the next crop of broccoli berserkers and cabbage crusaders, just as Dirk Anger and his other – still-loyal – agents of H.A.T.E. arrive in their flying citadel to unleash all the insane instruments of doom in their arsenal. However even the Drop Bears of Cuddly Koala Death, a flock of Assault Pterosaurs, Samurai Robots and Homicide Crabs cannot contain the righteous indignation of the forgotten heroes, and when Aaron counterattacks by stealing Dirk’s chic-est most secret possession the deviant Director has no choice but to retreat…

Beyond©orp’s follow-up BWMD event sees the terrorist entrepreneurs summon an extremely minor and rather young Elder God, Rorkannu, Lord of the Dank Dimension, and trade that for access to a deadly invading army of mystic behemoths that Dr. Strange fans will recognise as merciless “Mindless Ones” to decimate the town of Shotcreek, Colorado. Ready to back-up the embattled townspeople are Monica and her crew but things take a decidedly surreal turn as the monolithic marauders prove to be not all that mindless…

In the blistering last-stand battle Elsa becomes lost in fond reminiscences of her truly unique and bloody childhood, before, against all odds, the Captain stumbles onto Rorkannu and contrary to everyone’s expectations finally does something right…

When Steve Rogers became CaptainAmerica in 1941, nobody realised that a second Nazi spy stole his urine sample. Now, through most torturous and arcane paths, that last remnant of the original Super-Soldier serum has allowed the ruling elite of the Beyond© group to create whole battalions of customised metahuman champions…

When Nextwave finally track the terrorists to their inverted floating fortress they are confronted by an army of esoteric adversaries derived and developed from the misappropriated hero-pee and aligned in specifically themed teams such as The Surgery, The Vestry and The Homosexuality, but even such lethally dedicated foes as Dr. Headless, Father Pain, Dr. Nosexy, Sun King, Red Rosary and Slightly Creepy Policewoman pale into insignificance beside the reality-altering threat of Forbush-Man and his eerily familiar comrades the New Paramounts…

Once again plunged into horrifically violent combat, the Nextwave are slowly making bloody headway until the diminutive demon plunges the team into depressing and dreary alternate lives from the worst recesses of their inner visions. Sadly for Forbush-Man, nobody had ever found any evidence of intellect or imagination in Tabitha, just an overwhelming vacuity, urge to steal and need to blow stuff up…

With the end in sight the triumphant heroes invade the Beyond Corporation©’s hidden HQ State 51 just as Dirk Anger, transformed and degraded beyond imagination, arrives culminating in an even more spectacular clash before confronting the utterly macabre mastermind behind the monstrous marketing campaign of destruction; only to discover an even more bizarre kingmaker behind it all and finally bringing the hammer down once and for all…

As action comics in their purest form, the tales are laced with light-hearted lethality and superbly smutty innuendo with hints of Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s Hitman, Ben Edlund’s The Tick, Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Marshall Law and Ambush Bug, with all the verve, panache and invention of the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, Time Squad and Kids Next Door, all wrapped up in pithy corporate sloganeering a la Better Off Ted and Joseph Goebells…

Stuffed with in-joke extras such as the faux letters pages, sketches, the original Nextwave Pitch and the lyrics for that aforementioned theme song this is a glorious comic – in every sense of the word – and an experience no modern, fun-loving fan could possibly find fault with.

“Healing America by Beating People Up” and making us laugh by taking the piss…
© 2006, 2007, 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Northguard: Manifest Destiny


By Mark Shainblum & Gabriel Morrissette with Jacques Boivin and others (Caliber Press)
No ISBN, ASIN B00071Y8KK

The huge outpouring of fresh material which derived from the birth of American comicbooks’ Direct Sales revolution produced a plethora of innovative titles and creators – and let’s be honest – a host of appalling, derivative, knocked-off, banged-out trash too.

Happily I’m the boss of me and I choose to focus on the good and even great stuff…

The 1980s were an immensely fertile time for English-language comics-creators. In America an entire new industry had started with the birth of dedicated comics shops and, as innovation-starved specialist retail outlets sprung up all over the country, operated by fans for fans, a host of new publishers began to experiment with format, genre and content, whilst eager readers celebrated the happy coincidence that everybody seemed to have a bit of extra cash to play with.

Consequently those new publishers were soon aggressively competing for the attention and cash of punters who had grown resigned to getting their sequential art jollies from DC, Marvel, Archie and/or Harvey Comics. European and Japanese material began creeping in and by 1983 a host of young companies such as WaRP Graphics, Pacific, Eclipse, Capital, Now, Comico, Dark Horse, First and many others had established themselves and were making impressive inroads.

Most importantly, by avoiding the traditional family-focussed sales points such as newsstands, more mature material could be produced: not just increasingly violent and sexually explicit but also far more political and intellectually challenging too.

Subsequently, much of the “kid’s stuff” stigma finally dissipated andAmericabegan catching up to the rest of the world, partially acknowledging that comics might be a for-real art-form.

New talent, established stars and different takes on the old forms all found a thriving forum desperate for something a little different. Even smaller companies and foreign outfits had a fair shot at the big time and a lot of great material came – and, almost universally, as quickly went – without getting the attention or success they warranted.

One of the most critically acclaimed and enthralling features was a bleak yet fearfully authentic-seeming interpretation of real-world superheroics from Canadian independents Matrix Books who launched another superb and too-soon-lost costumed crusader on an uncaring world in 1984 with the advent of New Triumph featuring Northguard #1-5. The black and white series for mature readers was sadly lost in a growing storm of black and white self-published titles of varying quality and folded in 1985.

In 1989, Caliber Press licensed the property and launched a general readership, 3-issue miniseries Northguard: the ManDes Conclusion to wrap up the interrupted storyline, simultaneously packaging the original Matrix issues as Northguard: Manifest Destiny, one of the industry’s earliest trade paperback collections.

Written by Matrix founder Mark Shainblum and illustrated by Gabriel Morrissette the story is one that will delight dyed-in-the-wool comics fans as one of their own finally lives the dream…

The volume begins with a fascinating potted history of Canada’s comics industry and love-affair with patriotic superheroes in John Bell’s Foreword after which ‘…And Stand on Guard…’ (lettered by Ian Carr and with an early plotting and art assistance credit for Geof Isherwood) opens with a grisly assassination and a tragic air disaster, before introducing young Phillip Wise ofMontreal.

Left at home whilst his parents vacationed, the young fanboy is just settling in with a stack of comicbooks when a knock at the door leads to his abrupt abduction…

Regaining consciousness in a palatial apartment, Phillip is introduced to billionaire inventor  Ron Cape, a single-minded, altruistic industrialist who runs P.A.C.T. – Progressive Allied Canadian Technologies – a company run by benevolent capitalists with a new world vision…

Capehas his own spy team “Unit 7”, used to protect company secrets and keep his rivals honest, but in the course of their investigations the team has obtained proof that an American company is planning to overthrow the Canadian government. Their only clue to the scheme is the enigmatic code-term “ManDes”…

Used to direct action, P.A.C.T. intended to use a uniquely gifted, trained operative and their latest prototype – a miraculous energy weapon dubbed the Uniband – to covertly counter the imminent threat, but that guy was just murdered and his deputy died in an air crash. Now the device needs months of calibration to a specific set of brainwaves before it can be used…

Without a new controller the Uniband, which taps into a whole, new set of physics, is just a very expensive piece of ugly jewellery, but after hacking all the medical records in Quebec, the P.A.C.T. team luckily found a near-match for their dead agent’s thought patterns…

As the awestruck kid ponders the offer of a lifetime, in America’s Deep South a Fundamentalist Christian and racist manic named Tyler who runs Ultra, one of the world’s most powerful corporations, takes further steps to thwart Cape and his inner circle…

After a pensive night Phillip reaches a decision. He will become P.A.C.T.’s human gun, but only on his own terms. Rather than a secret agent Wise wants the technologists to turn him into a real-life superhero – complete with mask and costume…

Over a barrel and against the advice of his subordinates and directors, Capecomplies and Phillip rapidly undergoes cybernetic surgery and radical physical training to enable him to use the miraculous Uniband. No one is aware that the boy is already a target of Dugan, the assassin who killed his predecessor.

In a bloody confrontation however, the barely-competent kid turns the tables on his coldly pragmatic attacker by thinking like a comic book character and not a rational, trained professional…

Northguard, as Phillip now calls himself, even manages to very publicly save the Premier of the province on live TV and foil the ManDes scheme to instigate an Anglo-French race war inQuebec…

‘Awaken the Dreamers’ (with Bernie Mireault helping out Morrissette on the art) finds the Jewish Phillip tormented by nightmares of racial atrocity and P.A.C.T.’s core team riven by doubt and dissent at the turn events have taken. Nobody signed on to become clandestine policemen and the consequent death toll has everybody rattled…

Meanwhile in the basement of their HQ, Dugan has broken out of custody and gone on a murderous rampage through the building. This time though, he’s ready for the kid with the wonder-weapon and easily defeats him, but then makes the horrific mistake of trying to use Uniband himself…

Frustrated by his constant failures “The Reverend” prays for guidance and hears the Word of God. Ultra has two years to wipe out the blasphemy that isCanadaor the Almighty will cleanse the entire Earth…

Inked by Jacques Boivin, ‘Target Red, Target Blue: Making Hate’ finds Phillip called to P.A.C.T. to be stripped of the Uniband he failed to protect, but absconding before they can remove it. Wandering the streets of Montreal, he finds himself at a dojo and watches a stunning display of martial arts grace and power. With thoughts of learning taekwon-do he chats with the devastating Manon DesChamps and before he even knows what he’s doing the lad has transformed into Northguard before her unbelieving, admiring eyes…

Meanwhile in Boston, Massachusetts, Vietnamvet Ed Holman gets a package from P.A.C.T. that will make his new job even easier. The corporation’s latest technological marvel, acting with the metal plate in his head, now enables him to change his appearance at the press of a button. The Steel Chameleon is ready to become P.A.C.T.’s only super-agent…

As Manon attempts to teach Northguard to fight, they are attacked by a mercilessly efficient squad of operatives led by a psychotic American woman named Valerie White and only Phillip’s overwhelming firepower and Manon’s skill allow them to escape alive…

‘Target Red, Target Blue: Never Surrender’ (with additional inking from J. Harpes & friends) finds Steel Chameleon being briefed by Cape as Phillip awakens at Manon’s apartment. Almost immediately a Russian operative codenamed Redstorm warns the youngsters that Valerie has tracked them down and offers to buy the Uniband for an astronomical sum…

Whilst Holman reviews Intel and realises Valerie – a ruthless USagent known as Eagle – and Redstorm are about to renew their mutually assured and long-running dance of sex and death on Canadian soil, his phone rings. Once again Phillip has done the unexpected in a crisis and simply called for help.

But even as Steel Chameleon rushes to their location, Northguard and Manon have moved to direct action, blasting the Soviet team’s car as a distraction before fleeing on a motorcycle. With Eagle and her squad in hot pursuit the young fugitives are trapped in a shopping mall by the relentless Cold Warriors as keen to kill each other as take the Uniband…

With bullets flying and bodies dropping everywhere Holman arrives just in time to push the rival agents into a horrific miscalculation…

And at Ultra, the Reverend rages at another scheme spoiled by the infernal P.A.C.T. unbelievers and decides to declare all-out economic war onCape’s company…

This terrific tome sadly stops – but doesn’t end – on a compelling low note with ‘Games of the Heart’ as the assorted cast-members are shown in poignant and telling vignettes. Reverend Tyler lays his divinely-inspired plans and marshals his religious zealots whilst the troubleCape loses his most trusted and intimate confidante and Phillip reels with unaccustomed jealousy after meeting Manon’s boyfriend.

The determined kid still holds it together enough to undergo his first explosive full training session under the supervision of Steel Chameleon, however…

Of course nobody expected Manon to show up in a costume of her own, so how could they expect the dazzling Fleur-de-Lys to be so exceptionally efficient and effective at the whole superhero thing…
© 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1989 Mark Shainbloom and Gabriel Morrisette. Northguard, Fleur-de-Lys and all prominent characters are ™ Mark Shainbloom and Gabriel Morrisette. All rights reserved. Steel Chameleon © 1989 and ™Richard Comely/Star Rider Productions. Used under license.

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Lost in Time:


By Jean-Claude Forest & Paul Gillon with an introduction by Alex Toth (NBM)
ISBN: 0-918348-18-8

France has had an ongoing love affair with science fiction that goes back at least to the works of Jules Verne and – depending upon your viewpoint – possibly even as far back as Cyrano de Bergerac’s posthumously published fantasy stories L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune (The Other World: or the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les États et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun) published in 1657 and 1662, and their comic iterations have always been groundbreaking, superbly realised and deeply enjoyable.

A perfect case in point is Les Naufragés du Temps (alternately translated as either Castaways in Time or, as here, Lost in Time) created in 1964 byJean-ClaudeForest and classical master-draughtsman Paul Gillon.

Forest(1930-1998) was a Parisian and graduate of the Paris School of Design who began selling strips while still a student. His Flèche Noire (Black Arrow) led to a career illustrating for newspapers and magazines such as France-Soir, Les Nouvelles Littéraires and Fiction in the 1950s, all whilst producing the Charlie Chaplin-based comic series Charlot and acting as chief artist for publisher Hachette’s science fiction imprint Le Rayon Fantastique, for whom he produced illustrations and covers for imported authors A. E. Van Vogt, Jack Williamson, and others.

In 1962 he created Barbarella for V-Magazine and the sexy icon quickly took the county and the world by storm, consequently generating an explosion of SF Bandes dessinées features. Forest never looked back, subsequently creating Baby Cyanide and more serious tales like Hypocrite; the Verne-inspired Mysterious Planet; La Jonque Fantôme Vue de l’Orchestre and Enfants, c’est l’Hydragon qui Passe.

He also found time to script for other artists: Ici Même for Jacques Tardi, occult detective series Leonid Beaudragon for Didier Savard and with Gillon on the subject of today’s review – a classic of both comics and science fiction inexplicably all-but-ignored by English language publishers since the 1980s…

Paul Gillon (1926-2011) was also born inParisand suffered from debilitating Tuberculosis in early life. After his full recovery the isolated shut-in became something of a brilliant wild child, being expelled from many schools including the prestigious Ecole des Arts Graphiques.

As a teenager he considered a career in film, theatre or fashion but slipped almost accidentally into the world of cartooning and caricature, working freelance for such arts magazines as Samedi-Soir, France Dimanche and Gavroche.

The end of the war created chaotic circumstances in France and gave birth to a whole new comics industry and in 1947 Gillon began illustrating for the popular weekly Vaillant, both on existing adventures strips such as Wango and Lynx Blanc (both written by Roger Lécureux) and Jean Ollivier’s Le Cormoran as well as the later spin-off Jérémie which Gillon also scripted.

In 1950 he created Fils de Chine (Sons of China) with Lécureux which ran for three years.

Working in a refined and highly classicist style as personified by the likes of industry giants Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff and Hal Foster, Gillon also wrote and drew shorter complete pieces for titles such as 34 Camera, Femmes D’Aujourd’hui, Reves and Radar but his big break came in September 1959 when he began illustrating a daily soap-opera strip for national newspaper France Soir.

He would render the stunningly beautiful human heartbreaks of ’13, rue de l’Espoir’ until the end of 1972, becoming a household name in the process…

Based on the American serial The Heart of Juliet Jones and scripted by Jacques and François Gall, the feature followed the fortunes of vivacious Parisienne Françoise Morel, and unfolding daily took the heroine and the Family Morel through some of the most tumultuous years of modern European social change in nearly 4200 strips which were naturally compiled into two collected Albums – something else which should be translated into English but probably won’t be…

Throughout that period Gillon continued in comics, producing Jérémie, working for the Disney comic Journal de Mickey and other magazines and trying out new venues and genres.

Les Naufrages du Temps first appeared in 1964, part of the line-up in short-lived French comic Chouchou. A decade after the periodical closed the strip was reprinted and completed in daily newspaper France-Soir before being released as 2 bichromic (two-coloured) albums from major publisher Hachette in 1974 and 1975.  Two further book full-colour volumes followed in 1976.

In 1977 the saga was serialized in groundbreaking Sci-fi magazine Metal Hurlant, prompting publisher Les Humanoides Associes to re-release the four albums (L’Etoile Endormie or The Sleeping Star, La Mort Sinueuse – The Creeping Death, Labyrinthes – Labyrinths – and L’Univers Cannibale – The Cannibal Universe) in colour, before continuing the series with Gillon scripting as well as illustrating until its end in 1989: a total of six further volumes.

Never idle, Gillon then created spy-thriller Les Leviathans (The Leviathans) for Les Humanoides and adult science fiction epic La Survivante (The Survivor) for L’Echo des Savanes, adapted literary classics such as Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and re-imagined the legend of Joan of Arc as the erotic  epic Jehanne. His later efforts included Processus de Survie (Survival Process) in 1984 and La Derniere des Salles Obscures (The Last of the Dark Rooms) in 1998.

He remains one ofFrance’s most honoured, celebrated and revered comics creators and just why so few of his incredibly illustrated tales have been translated is an utter mystery to me.

One that did make the jump was Lost in Time: Labyrinths, released as a spectacular hardback by NBM in 1987 and one of the few European imports to be seen “cold” in the USA (i.e. without first running as a serial in Heavy Metal magazine).

As I’ve previously mentioned Labyrinths was the third album of the French series and opened with a neceassry preamble…

So just to recap something we hadn’t actually seen: at the end of the 20th century humanity was imperilled by “the Scourge” – a plague of extraterrestrial spores and/or a global sickness of its own negligent making. Chris Cavallieri and Valerie Haurele were selected for a shot at survival and placed in suspended animation in individual space-capsules to preserve the best of our race and possibly reconstruct our lost glories in a newer age.

A thousand years later Chris was awakened into a bewildering but thriving multi-species civilisation in deadly danger. Earth was a derelict, plague world inhabited by mutant monsters, and a multi-species civilisation had abandoned it and grown to inhabit a hugely re-configured Solar system.

Helping the inhabitants of the patchwork “System” – ex-pat human, alien and genetically altered/hybridised animal-beings – to defeat an invasion by alien winged rats dubbed the Thrass, Chris fortuitously found Valerie’s lost capsule and revived her – but the longed-for happy event led to utter disaster.

Throughout their millennial slumber both ancient human lovers had dreamt of each other and their perfect reunion, but once they were together again in a furious new future they discovered that they could not stand each other…
This tale begins after the defeated Thrass have fled the System and Valerie, rejected by Chris, has disappeared. The resurrected Ancient and his new-found true love Mara (one of the scientists who first recovered and rehabilitated Christopher) are the topic of much discussion amongst his new friends Dr. Otomoro and military cyborg Major Lisdal, whilst Chris himself haunts morgues and seedy dives of the pan-cosmopolitan city of Roobo-ein-Sarra on System capital Limovan, unable to shake his destructive and obsessive fear for the fate of his millennial ex-lover…

Depressed, despondent and bitterly confused, Chris wanders the exotic streets and bazaars where hordes of newly-liberated beings manically celebrate their hard-won safety and security, unaware that he has been targeted by sinister plotters. An old “frenemy”, Morfina, accosts him and, past injuries and seductions forgotten, lures the old Earthman to the Mood Market, a vast, baroque area of bordellos run by legendary criminal overlord The Boar, a burly, erudite and unctuous humanoid with a Tapir’s head.

(In the original this major series villain is in fact the Tapir – I’ve no idea why he was so erroneously renamed but have a sneaking suspicion that it involves European prejudices about English and American educational attainment…)

Completely off-guard, Chris succumbs to sybaritic release and is framed for the murder of a diplomat and his companion whilst out of his head. Once awake and panicked by the corpses around him, the Last Earthman accepts the extremely costly aid of the Boar to escape…

Even Christopher believes himself guilty until he discusses the affair with Mara, Lisdal and Otomoro in the cold light of day. However, even as the wool is pulled from his eyes and he realises his precarious predicament, the bamboozled ancient is utterly unaware that The Boar is working with the compliant vindictive Valerie, who is briefing the crime-lord on all Chris’s secrets…

When Lisdal suggests seeking help from brilliant scientific maverick Saravon Leobart the friends are welcomed by the aged sage, but the Boar moves quickly, sending his gamin cyber-assassin Baby to quickly whisk Chris and Mara away under the pretext that the police have arrested Lisdal and Otomoro…

It’s all a colossal bluff: the Boar needs Chris to recover a deadly pre-Scourge secret weapon cached away at the time of humanity’s fall and all the data needed to find and operate it lies buried in the Ancient’s subconscious. Chris is completely unaware that the thing even exists: his mind was re-programmed before his hibernation and only the vengeful Valerie holds the secret of retrieving it…

Soon the Boar and his “guests” are hurtling deep into the outer system with Leobart, Morfina and Chris’ friends in hot pursuit. After a brutal clash in space Chris and Mara are rescued but the Boar is ready and willing to retaliate and even the benevolent Leobart is not all he seems…

To Be Continued…

This is a beautiful, stately and supremely authoritative adult fantasy thriller, tantalisingly teasing the reader with the promise of so much more. The second part was released in English as Lost in Time: Cannibal World in 1987, but even that only moved the saga forward without comfortably ending things. As far as I know the only other Gillon works to make it into English are the first two volumes of The Survivor…

Mature, solid science fiction with thoroughly believable and pettily human characters confronted with fantastic situations, lots of action and loads of nudity: how on Earth has this sublime series remained a secret French Possession for so very long?
© Les Humanoides Associes. © NBM 1986 for the English edition.

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Zeppelin – Stories from the Warzone


By Pepe Moreno (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-021-5

Born in 1954, Spanish creator Pepe Moreno began his comics career illustrating for horror and adventure anthologies and children’s papers such as S.O.S., Pumby and Pulgarcito, Star and Bliz. He moved to America in 1977, working for Warren’s Creepy, Eerie 1984/1994 and Vampirella, as well as contributing to humour magazine National Lampoon before inevitably gravitating to Heavy Metal where the short, uncompromising post-punk sci-fi strips collected in this album caught the attention of Epic Illustrated editor Archie Goodwin.

The breakthrough strip Generation Zero led to the graphic novels Rebel, Joe’s Air Force and Gene Kong, but ever-restless, Moreno’s growing fascination with real-world technology led him first into animation (Tiger Sharks, Thunder Cats and Silver Hawks) and eventually into the formative field of computer-assisted illustration, resulting in a return to comics for the high-profile futuristic Batman thriller Digital Justice, one of the first comics sagas created completely on screen rather than on paper.

He then created an early CD-ROM thriller (Hellcab) in 1993, and these days spends most of his time working in high-end video games.

Crafted in the politically contentious yet conservative mid-Eighties when dystopian dreams of fallen empires abounded and post-apocalyptic survivalism was the prevailing zeitgeist, the short tales gathered here capture – in a beguiling burst of pop-art style and colour – a profusion of weird war tales that push man and imagination to ultimate limits… Following a Foreword from Moreno, the merciless wonderment begins with the eponymous ‘Zeppelin’ as two F-4 Phantom jets take off from an American aircraft carrier and encounter something far beyond a human capacity to understand, before being lost in time and accidentally triggering one of the most infamous disasters in recorded history…

‘La Mort en Rose’ focuses on a weary Tommy in the trenches of The Great War, when response to a new Boche poison gas utterly confounds and horrifies the German Generals who sanctioned it. Suffice to say those aged masters of war made sure it was never used again…

Back then we all thought that the next war would probably be the very last one, and that sentiment informs the last-ditch battles and eventually ironic defeat of the commander of ‘Bunker 6A’, whilst the stunning artistic experimentalism of ‘Kamikaze’ renders it the most memorable war-story in the collection despite its truly hackneyed “twist” ending…

‘The Fix’ follows a semi-delusional space ferry pilot back to a wasteland Earth and a reward that is neither just nor fit for heroes, and ‘Space Crusader’ reminds us that missionary zeal knows no limits when the pious warrior aboard Inquisitor II lands on the welcoming and innocently obliging planet of the hot naked chicks…

This slim, technicolor tome terminates with ‘Epus’ a dark contemporary battle-yarn that sees a dying GI in Vietnam somehow sucked back in time to challenge an ancient god of conflict for an answer to mankind’s martial madness…

Vivid pinball, poster and bubblegum hues blend with a stunning capacity to render machinery, monstrosity and ordnance to produce a wryly cynical paean to war-fever and programmed paranoia that will delight all fans of science fiction and blockbuster action.

Inexplicably out-of-print, this is plain-and-simple adult escapism no comics connoisseur could possible resist …
© 1986 Pepe Moreno. English language edition © 1986 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.

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The Moon Looked Down and Laughed – a Holy Cross graphic novel


By Malachy Coney & Paul J. Holden (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-263-7

The Irish have always rightly prided themselves on their ability to tell a tale and comics especially have long-benefited from that blessed gift. One writer especially gifted and yet inexplicably not world famous yet is Malachy Coney, who first started turning heads in Fleetway’s socially informed Crisis in 1989 when he was invited by Pat Mills to co-write a sequence of the controversial serial Third World War set in Ireland.

Coney was raised in the Ardoyne area of Belfast during the time of “The Troubles” and much of his work deals with the politics of the era and issues of gender and gay rights.

In 1993 he scripted the miniseries Holy Cross for Fantagraphics: three separate tales all linked by history, geography and incidental characters Jimmy and Davy – a local gay couple – illustrated respectively by Davy Francis, Chris Hogg and P. J. Holden. That lost delight happily led to the lovely book under discussion today.

Since then Coney, who is also a cartoonist and publisher, has written a number of Gay-themed superhero tales (Major Power and Spunky, The Dandy Lion, The Simply Incredible Hunk), socially aware material such as The Good Father and Catholic Lad, and worked with Garth Ennis on Top Cow’s The Darkness and Steven Grant on Vampirella.

Active in the arts in Northern Ireland, he has contributed to DNASwamp, Small Axe and Fortnight, produced material for the internet and self-publishes his own Good Craic Comics.

Paul Jason Holden is also from Belfast and, as well as working closely with Coney on the Holy Cross stories, The Dandy Lion and The Simply Incredible Hunk, has illustrated Mike Carey’s ‘Suicide Kings’ and worked for Warhammer Monthly, 2000AD, Judge Dredd Megazine, Image Comics, Garth Ennis’ Battlefields and Strip Magazine. He is also active in developing web- and app-based comics…

Rendered in stark and seductive black and white, The Moon Looked Down and Laughed is again set in the Holy Cross district of Belfast and is narrated by hopeful writer Tommy Doherty, a decent and sentimental young man just starting to learn the way of the world.

He’s always got time to listen to his old dad’s stories about the bad days past, especially the one when he was a young man doing odd jobs for a mean, rich old sod named Burke. That privileged, demented swine used to work him like a slave every day and then set the dog on him if he stayed on his land one second after quitting-time. Sometimes Burke even deliberately kept him late just to see him run…

That all changed on the fateful day Pa Doherty’s watch stopped and the vicious landowner gloatingly watched as the manic canine brought him down…

Of course that was the day sheer terror made the worm turn and a scared lad learned another use for the hated shovel in his hands…

From that he learned a hard but necessary lesson: there are mad dogs everywhere and usually the shovel is the only way of dealing with them…

With thoughts of wildlife documentaries, carnivores and prey in his head, Tommy heads for the pub and a drink with his outrageous pals Jimmy and Davy and obliquely encounters the district’s apex predator when Francie O’Neill‘s gang of thugs and troublemakers harass him for hanging out with “faggots”…

It had only been weeks since the pack of jackals had beaten up Jimmy and Davy in one more gay-bashing incident. O’Neill had been a bully since they were all at school but always managed to come off like some roguish golden boy. Nobody could understand why the loveliest girl in class had married him, especially Tommy, for whom Annie would always be “the one”, ever since that incident when they played “spin-the-bottle” as nippers…

Now she was shackled to a possessive, brutal thug, permanently pregnant and with all the life leaching out of her.

Staggering away at closing time, Tommy and the boys spot Francie stalking the streets, looking for a fight to start and, not for the first time, the writer ponders the worth of pens against swords and why people like that are allowed to get away with so much…

Pa Doherty’s pride and joy is his allotment garden and on the way there next day, father and son see an ambulance rushing away. It seems poor fat Big Junior has had a breakdown and harmed himself. The lad wasn’t the same since his ma died and the constant bullying and sadistic harassment by certain people has pushed him over the edge…

As they watch Annie O’Neill and her two oldest pass by, Pa invites them to spend time in his garden. The kids have the best day of their life just playing and, with a bit of peace at last, Annie idly chats about the old days with Tommy…

The next day the writer answers a desperate call: his father is in a bad way. It seems someone has destroyed his precious beloved garden; razed it to rubble and ruins…

Consoling the heartbroken and despondent elder, Tommy sees Francie’s unmistakable signature to the despicable act. Soon after, finding the psychotic lout terrorising his own wife and children, the frustrated scribe realises he has found his own mad dog…

Disposing of the body on the nearby railway tracks, the shell-shocked and traumatised writer is unaware that Jimmy and Davy have been witnesses to the whole thing…

And that’s just the start of Tommy Doherty’s road from boy to man in this superbly told tale, blending wry humour and bucolic Celtic charm with shatteringly personal conflicts that test the miraculous bonds of childhood loyalty and friendship, revealing not only the horrific acts good men can be pushed to but how deeds shape character and how little the universe case…

Long overdue for re-issue preferably in a bumper edition collecting the three-issue Holy Cross miniseries and the fabled unpublished fourth issue as well, this is a wonderfully beguiling and incisive story of human life at its most vibrant and compelling…
© 1997 Malachy Coney & Paul J. Holden. This edition © 1997 Fantagraphic Books. All rights reserved.

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Joe’s Bar


By José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo, translated by Jeff Lisle (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-85286035-6

Argentinian José Antonio Muñoz was born on July 10th 1942 in Buenos Aires and studied at the prestigious Escuela Panamericana de Arte de Buenos Aires under comics geniuses Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia before joining the prolific Francisco Solano Lopez studio at the age of 18. Soon his work was appearing in Hora Cero and Frontera Extra and he was ghosting episodes of the legendary serial Ernie Pike for his old tutor Pratt.

Through the Argentine-based Solano Lopez outfit, he began working on material for British publishing giant Amalgamated Press/IPC, but had no real feeling for the material he was producing. Moreover, like so many others, he was increasingly uncomfortable in his homeland and was compelled to leave Argentina in December 1972 as the military junta tightened its totalitarian grip on the country and increasingly clamped down on free expression and the arts, as well as all forms of overt or covert dissent.

Moving to England, Spain and later Italy, Muñoz met again fellow émigré and creative soul-mate Carlos Sampayo in Barcelona in 1974 and convinced the poet, music critic, copywriter and author to try his hand at comics. The result was the stunning noir Private Eye expressionistic masterpiece of loss and regret Alack Sinner…

The poet Sampayo, born in 1943, grew up with all the same formative experiences as his artistic comrade and, after a similar dispiriting start (he had tried writing and being a literary editor before resigning himself to work in advertising), had moved to Spain in 1972.

The pair had first briefly met in 1971 when mutual friend Oscar Zarate (who wrote one of the two introductions in this collection) left Argentina in the forefront of the creative exodus sparked by the rise of “the Colonels”…

Urged by old mentor Hugo Pratt to “do something of your own” the pair began producing the adventures of an ex-New York cop turned Shamus, haunting the shadows of the world’s greatest, darkest city, encountering the bleak underbelly of the metropolis and all the outcasts, exiles and scum thrown together at its margins. The series debuted in experimental Italian anthology Alter Linus, then was picked up by Belgian giant Casterman for (A Suivre) and compiled in a number of albums.

Inexplicably there have been no English-language collections of the stunningly superb saga since a proposed 12-issue series from Fantagraphics was curtailed and cancelled after 5 volumes in the late 1980s, although a couple of short stories also appeared in anthology magazines Prime Cuts and Raw.

All that necessary preamble at last leads us to Joe’s Bar – which appeared as a dingy watering hole in the very first Alack Sinner story ‘The Webster Case’ – and soon began running as a parallel, occasional series featuring and indeed often debuting characters who would spring into stories and series of their own. In 1988 Titan Books released a British edition of Catalan Communications’ single volume of short stories from the place where nobody wants to know your name, and it remains one of the very best noir graphic novels ever released in English… and is similarly absent from modern publishing schedules.

The bar is situated in a multi-ethnic melting pot that covers the worst part of the city and acts as a crossroads and crucible for a vast cast of lost, lonely and desperate characters just trying to get by one night at a time and, following that aforementioned ‘Muñoz & Sampayo: a Profile’ by Zarate and an introduction from British comics historian Paul Gravett, the horror and heartache begins with a taciturn young man who earns his living cooking and cleaning in the greasy dive.

‘Pepe, the Architect’ is an illegal immigrant caught in the Green Card trap – no work without the card, no card without a job. Only Joe knows his secret, even the desperate lad’s girlfriend has no idea of his shameful status, but when the assassination of a foreign ambassador uptown sends hordes of cops into the teeming Diaspora district, Pepe sees himself inevitably exposed, captured and deported to the land where torturers eagerly await him…

Imagining hunters at every corner, the lad is picked up by a woman hungry for any kind of warmth but Pepe’s paranoia overwhelms his lust and he attacks her, leaving her for dead before heading back to the Bar. Unable to work, swiftly getting far too drunk, the fugitive architect shares his story with an old black man who’s seen far too much misery, unaware that the night holds more grief in store…

‘Rusty Stories’ opens as broken-down, punch-drunk old fighter Moses Man shambles through the grimy the streets, until he’s recognised by current wrestling champ Tigran Pacha. The latest hotshot offers the shattered legend a big purse for an “exhibition match” – grappler versus boxer – simultaneously wondering how such a legend could fall so low. With Man cleaning up for his big comeback, the memories return and, with visions of gamblers and gangsters, mad hubris and the wrong kind of woman boiling in his battered brain, when he finally gets back in the ring he ignores the fix and things get far too serious…

Muñoz & Sampayo brilliantly rewrote the rules that make comics work with their stark, vivid, ugly pictures describing deep, often elliptical personal journeys of complex characters with no beginning and often no appreciable end. Moreover individual tales frequently intersected and overlapped, as with the meat of the next piece.

‘Ella’ is a photographer. She’s often taken candid shots of that P.I. Sinner, Pepe the dishwasher, the bum Moses Man and all the other hopeless characters at the Bar, but now she’s the one in the depths. Convinced she is dying, she constantly re-examines her brief passionate affair with that mysterious black guy and wonders if race really does matter. Why did he leave her that way? What was going on? And then, on the bustling street she sees him and everything becomes clear…

The drama ends with the tragic ‘Fifth Story’ wherein a guy in prison shares his story with a cellmate…

Everything was going okay for young Mike Weiss. The store was doing fine and he’d finally blundered into asking that Feldman girl out – over ice cream and in the bar, yet. Of course she eventually had to take the initiative but that was fine too. Then his beloved old man got the cancer and started wasting way. As his father shrivelled Mike retreated into food, gorging himself into a stupor as his father dwindled into a dry husk filled with pain.

Even Rosa couldn’t reach him then. All he wanted was bad food and release from his father’s ghastly, continual pleas. Anyway, what kind of parent begs a loving son to kill him?

When life couldn’t get any worse, Mike was jumped by thugs in the street who dealt him another shattering blow which galvanised the poor schmuck into finally ending his dad’s pain. But even in jail poor Mike’s woes hadn’t quite ended…

Whilst the plots are deliberately generic, pimping starting points from a hundred pulp stories and noirish B-movies, the choice, fresh meat of the stories comes from the spotlight shining on those grotesque, useless inconsequential strangers and bystanders left behind once the flawed, noble heroes and glittering sultry sirens have moved on, especially once Muñoz casts his highly stylised, excoriatingly expressionistic vision upon them and their harsh, uncompromising, inescapable world.

Concentrating on the peripheral shadows and unturned corners of that grim shared universe where Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson, James M. Cain and the rest ply their trade, Muñoz & Sampayo have created a fierce and unforgettable environment that is truly and uniquely pure comics.

Dark, bleak, sordid and tawdry, the lives coinciding and congealing at Joe’s Bar offer a truly astonishing view of the other side of the world, one that no lover of truly mature fiction could bear to tear appalled yet fascinated eyes away from.
© 1987 Carlos Sampayo & José Muñoz. Introductions © Oscar Zarate, Paul Gravett & Art Spiegelman.

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Japan Inc. – an introduction to Japanese Economics


By Shōtarō Ishinomori, translated by Betsey Scheiner (University of California Press)
ISBN: 978-0-52006-289-4

It’s often been said, but bears repeating here: “Comics are an integral part of Japanese life”. There’s no appreciable difference to Eastern eyes between sequential pictures and prose, so it makes sense that such a medium should be used to educate and elucidate as well as entertain. After all the US military reached the same conclusion after WWII when they commissioned comics legend Will Eisner to design instruction manuals in strip form, and produce similar instructive material for Services magazines like P*S, the Preventative Maintenance Monthly, which even the least schooled G.I. could understand…

In late 1986 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan’s analogue of the Wall Street Journal, commissioned manga star Shōtarō Ishinomori to adapt a serious economic text – Zeminaru Nihon keizai nyÅ«mon published by the newspaper – into a mass market comicbook. Manga Nihon keizai nyÅ«mon sold more than half a million copies in its first year…

Soon after, Securities and Investment companies were using strip brochures to explain the complexities of their latest stock market products and by the mid 1980s benkyō and jitsumu manga (“study comic” and “practical comic”) were an integral part of school and college libraries. Naturally, there were sequels to Manga Nihon keizai nyūmon…

Shōtarō Ishinomori (nee Onodera and Ishimori; January 25th 1938 – January 28th 1998) is officially the World’s most prolific comics artist. After his death the Guinness Book of Records posthumously recorded his 128,000+ pages – often generated at the rate of 200-300 pages a month! – the most ever produced by a single creator.

In 1955, when the boy was simply keen fan of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, the God of Comics took the lad on as his assistant and apprentice, beginning with the iconic Tetsuwan Atomu – or Astro Boy to you and me…

Thereafter, until his death Ishinomori worked ceaselessly in Manga, Anime, Games and Tokusatsu (live action superhero shows such as Kamen Rider – a genre he practically invented) developing groundbreaking series such as Super Sentai, Cyborg 009, Sabu to Ichi Torimono Hikae, Ganbare!! Robokon and countless others.

There is a museum dedicated to his career in Ishinomaki, Miyagi and trains to and from the site are decorated throughout with his myriad cartoon creations.

Following a comprehensive and informative account on the development and growth of comics in Japan by Stanford University’s Peter Duus, this oddly engaging English-language edition reveals the way the Japanese perceived their own economy’s function and global position through the fictionalised lives of a small group of workers at the mythic conglomerate Toyosan Automobile Corporation and its affiliate the Mitsutomo Company.

The cast are idealised concepts of the nation’s business life: Kudo is a good and kind-hearted executive, always seeking to put profit in a social framework that benefits everybody, whilst his colleague and rival Tsugawa is a ruthless, go-getter to whom people are expendable and only the Bottom Line matters. Above them is wise manager Akiyama, with the women’s role exemplified by shy yet passionate Miss Amamiya, whilst young office junior Ueda portrays the verve, exuberance and inexperience of the next generation of Japan’s workers…

The elucidating episodes begin with ‘Trade Friction’ as in 1980 American car workers begin attacking imported Japanese cars. Ever hungry for a fast buck, the US motor industry lays off staff and attempts to force Washington into curtailing Japanese imports…

If the exporting nation is to maintain its growth, it may have to shift production to the USA and leave its own workers and subcontractors out in the cold. Soon there’s panic at Toyosan’s factory and the union is up in arms, but whilst Tsugawa has no problem with that, the ingenious Kudo is working on a plan to diversify and provide new jobs for the ordinary Japanese suffering under the outrageous US tactics…

‘Countering the Rise of the Yen’ sees the disparity in international exchange rates threaten Imahama City as their crucial export trade crumbles. When Tsugawa seizes the opportunity to buy the place cheap and turn it into a Mitsutomo amusement park, once more Kudo interferes, seeking a way to keep all the citizens of the district fully employed whilst delivering a sound lesson on the way to balance family life and duty to the company…

Geo-political affiliations and the ever-shifting balance of power in rogue states comes under scrutiny in ‘Industrial Structure’ when a Middle-Eastern country seeks to revive a secret industrial process and past alliance with Mitsutomo. The shady deals that were struck in the pursuit of guaranteed resources offer huge potential profit but a concomitant risk of disastrous political and financial fall-out if the scheme is exposed. Of course Tsugawa and Kudo and their respective mentors Toda and Akiyama are in the thick of things in a chapter dramatically illustrating how changes in international political climate reshape Japan’s industrial structure…

The nation’s welfare system is tested in ‘Deficit Finance’ as Ueda’s aged grandmother comes to visit and Japan’s social services are scrutinised by Tsugawa and Kudo, who learn the advantages and drawbacks of government-led initiatives whilst both learning some hard-hitting historical lessons about the last (in their case 1965) Recession…

‘A Monetary Revolution’ describes the inexorable global banking de-regulation of the 1970s and 1980s as Tsugawa visits London following the “suicide” of an Italian banker and falls into a hornet’s nest of trouble by involving Mitsutomo in a “Fi-Tech” scheme (covert financial speculation between banks, usually achieved by mutually monkeying with the proposed profit margin) that involves the Vatican’s Mafia-run Financial House… Anybody else positively dizzy with déjà vu…?

When it all comes bubbling to a head it’s only Kudo’s swift thinking and sharp dealing that turns an unmitigated catastrophe into a business triumph, after which the ‘Epilogue’ neatly sums up the subtly effective lessons learned throughout the book and depicts our cast as the look forward to what might lie ahead

Using a stylish soap-opera and captivatingly effective scenario to put a personal face on history – or indeed Global Finance in this case – is a technique the modern film industry has used for decades, with fictionalised accounts of historical figures and events as far-ranging as The King’s Speech to Flight 93 to Shakespeare in Love leading a vital veracity to even the most fanciful proceeding, and it works magnificently here whilst the subplots (sex, political intrigue, bribery, espionage, blackmail, sacrificing family life for the job and, of course, the war between prosperity and personal honour) all work perfectly to put a human frame to what might seem dry and dusty lecturing

Whilst not to everyone’s taste, this book certainly shows how emphatic and powerful a tool comics can be, whilst to my mind it has a far more lasting dramatic appeal than many of its contemporary money-worshipping entertainments such as Dallas, Dynasty or Wall Street…

One interesting point about this book is the perceptible subtext and open undercurrent describing a general mistrust of all politicians – shadings that most British scholarly texts are keen and careful to disguise at all costs. US President Ronald Reagan is constantly depicted as either a buffoon or a conniving demon but he gets off lightly compared to Japanese officialdom, from the lowliest local administrator or union rep all the way to the highest statesmen in the land…

Here the words and pictures don’t prevaricate: Business Good, Politicians Bad…

And on that I couldn’t possibly comment…

© 1988 the Regents of the University of California. © 1986 Shōtarō Ishinimori, reprinted by permission of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.

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Bell’s Theorem volumes 1-3


By Matthias Schultheiss, translated by Tom Leighton & Bernd Metz (Catalan Communications)
ISBNs: 0-87416-037-5, 0-87416-062-6 and 0-87416-074-X

Although German, supreme sequential stylist Matthias Schultheiss, like so many other international comics creators, found widespread fame and success in France’s monumental bandes dessinées publishing culture.

Born in Nuremberg in 1946 the award-winning author and artist began his working life as an apprentice cabinet maker, before studying illustration at Hamburg’s Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation he freelanced in the commercial art field until 1981 when his graphic novel The Trucker began in the magazine Comics umgesetzt (the Comic Reader). After illustrating Charles Bukowski’s The Long Job, and Broken in the City, after which, in 1984, the artist self-penned the controversial Kalter Krieg (Cold War), which was “forbidden” by West Germany’s Federal Review Board and listed as a “harmful publication” due to perceived problems with its despondent political tone.

With The Trucker syndicating in Denmark, Schultheiss met with French publisher Albin Michel in 1985, producing shorts for the prestigious L’Écho des savanes. That same year he began the groundbreaking metaphysical thriller and philosophical tour de force Die Wahrheit über Shelby (The Truth about Shelby) under discussion here.

Three spectacular, challenging and uncompromising volumes Lebenslänglich, Die Verbindung and Der Kontakt (Lifetime, The Compound and The Contact) appeared between 1996-1988, to great international acclaim, and since then Schultheiss has produced a number of challenging, epic works for increasingly broader markets, including the triptych The Sharks of Lagos, The Track, Night Taxi, Talk Dirty amongst others.

In 1993 he produced the strikingly surreal superhero Propeller Man for Dark Horse Comics – to decidedly mixed American reception – after which he more or less abandoned comics for television writing, only returning in 2002 with The Puddle.

Since then he has produced Woman on the River for manga giant Kodansha, Travels with Bill, and Daddy, a controversial and pithy exploration of the Second Coming of Jesus…

Translated and released by Catalan Communications in the late 1980s, The Truth about Shelby became Bell’s Theorem and the three volumes were redubbed Lifer, The Connection and Contact, introducing a vicious, hard-as-nails career thug rechristened “Shalby” and following his inevitable path to destruction after he’s picked out by an incomprehensible universe to endure the cosmic vagaries of quantum mechanics in irresistible motion…

Just in case you were wondering: the new title comes from John Stewart Bell’s 1964 paper “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox”, in which the renowned Irish physicist addressed the objections cited by science giants Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen who didn’t fully accept the plausibility of a Theory of Quantum Mechanics.

Summed up in the statement “No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of Quantum Mechanics”, Bell introduced the concept of Hidden Variable Theories to show how the old guard’s stipulations that the effects of Locality and Realism negated the possibility of quantum physics.

I’m sure I’ve got that all wrong, but suffice to say for the sake of the comic tale here, it means that all events are connected in ways we can’t necessarily perceive or understand…

Lifer introduces Shalby, a vicious criminal not long for this world. The other convicts are determined to kill him, but after the latest savage attack the callous thug finally accedes to the warden’s insistent offers and signs up for an experimental program in another jail. He doesn’t even care that much if the promised pardon for surviving the tests is real or not…

Deep in a desert complex under burning skies, Shalby is injected with drugs and strapped to a ghastly hi-tech torture chair. The first session reduces him to a bloody, leaking wreck and whilst recovering in the infirmary he is visited by another test-subject, sneaking in through an air-duct…

Even with half his face missing Frank seems to know what’s going on. The place is part of a top secret military project and the other prisoners have no chance of survival, but if Shalby can escape before he becomes too weak he can blow the whistle on the whole sordid mess…

With Frank’s aid Shalby kills one of doctors and makes his break; hopping a freight train and hitching rides to anywhere else. However the drugs in his system are still working: he’s feeling shaky and can’t stop bleeding. Luckily Frank gave him some pills and hypos to counteract the effects of the scientists’ experiments…

With cops hard on his tail, Shalby collapses and is rescued by a young doctor who hides him and tends to his many wounds. After two weeks the fugitive is fighting fit again and his saviour has also provided him with a car and money. Immune to gratitude, Shalby rapes her when she refuses to sleep with him before heading off into the night…

Determined to escape at all costs, Shalby heads north and buys passage to Canada on a smuggling plane, landing on a desolate stretch of seashore in Labrador, miles from anywhere…

The beach is strewn with maritime wrecks, debris and the skeletons of whales. Constantly far out to sea, Shalby’s only companions are more of the vast cetaceans, sporting in the cold uninviting waves.

However, his search for shelter only offers mystery as the brute discovers bizarre machines everywhere: peculiar contraptions of string and bone, sticks and scraps of metal…

When he falls into a pit he finds a mummified corpse wearing more of the impossible devices and headphones made from discarded tin-cans. The place is a bunker of sorts with science texts and esoteric notes scattered everywhere, but beggars can’t be choosers and Shalby repairs the roof and moves in.

The notes belong to Mark Amselstein, a physicist from Hamburg, who also left cash and a passport. The photo shows that Amselstein was a dead ringer for Shalby and his jottings describe an incredible experiment into insane connections in time and space. Moreover, whenever the whales appear, those tin headphones crackle with eerie, haunting sounds…

In all this time alone, Shalby has been unaware that there are hunters on his trail, but when he spots a plane circling above his beach the fugitive acts instantly, snatching up Amselstein’s papers, passport and whatever else he can carry, setting off inland just as winter hits the great wilderness.

Weeks later a weary, shaggy trapper walks into snowbound Montreal, rents a hotel room and emerges as Mark Amselstein, Ph. D. Buying as ticket to Hamburg and idly attempting to pick up a woman in the airport bar, the dapper doctor is abruptly accosted by two mysterious men…

Shalby, with the aid of an unsuspecting innocent bystander, savagely deals with the enigmatic agents and hurriedly boards his flight, but soon realises that he is experiencing horrifying, unimaginable hallucinations…

The Connection opens with Shalby recoiling from a dusty decaying spectre in a parka and goggles, who quickly resolves into a pretty fellow passenger. Shaken, he subsides into pensive speculation and when the plane lands quickly debarks and heads for Amselstein’s old address. Meanwhile in a sanatorium, the normally quiescent Paul begins to strain against his straitjacket. The attendants don’t understand why he keeps screaming “he’s here”…

Amselstein’s apartment is an empty hovel by the docks, deep in the infamous Red Light district of the Reeperbahn. However a clever clue leads the escaped convict to the missing physicist’s true base, an abandoned dredger deep in the ice-bound industrial wasteland of the Harbour.

His arrival has not gone unnoticed. One streetwalker in particular is keen to observe him, as are a number of furtive men haunting the area but utterly uninterested in the flesh on sale and for rent…

As Shalby investigates the old scow he finds more of the esoteric scrap-and-string constructions amidst the shambolic cabins but no immediate threat and, exhausted, dozes off.

Elsewhere his dogged followers are revealed as American spies, desperate to recover the missing scientist who was a vital part of their Star Wars Defence Initiative. At the highest level the decision is made: get Amselstein back, willing or otherwise…

Further exploring the deserted hulk, Shalby finds fresh food and more of the dead boffin’s notes. Baffled by concepts which impossibly stipulate that the universe is constantly created by the beings in it and that all times and places are one, the bewildered thug experiences all-consuming, full-sensory flashbacks and finds himself returned to the beach, playing underwater with cetaceans and on the dredger’s bridge all at once.

As the Americans search Amselstein’s deserted flat, far away the deranged Paul also experiences uncanny forces and as the spies find pointers to a harbour hideaway, the windows suddenly explode, killing one of them.

Bizarre things keep happening to Shalby. For a few terrifying moments the dredger is transported from its moorings to a shattering storm far out at sea, but more disturbingly the convict’s studies are making sense of a science that should be beyond him. The key passage seems to indicate that Amselstein had proved that he personally existed “on several levels without having any conscious knowledge of it” …

On a purely mundane level however, another mystery is solved when a skateboarding hooker comes aboard. She had been Amselstein’s girlfriend and has kept the galley stocked for his eventual return.

Ignoring his doubt and confusion and knowing the scientist intimately, she has no doubts as to his identity…

As Paul begins building his own string and stick machines, the Americans are closing in on Amselstein. When they finally corner their target they are utterly unprepared for the violent response of the supposedly sedentary scientist…

On the run again, Shalby cannot stop delving into Amselstein’s preposterous notes, even though his horrifying visions are occurring with greater frequency. Flashing back and forth across the world, swimming with whales, shifting in time, the episodes all leave him shocked and drained, giving the spies and their hired cronies an opportunity to corner him once more. Yet again however, his insatiable drive to be free saves Shalby and after seeking brief comfort with the still nameless prostitute, the rattled fugitive makes a crucial connection with an ever-present tramp who knows far more than he should…

With unexplained events such as uncontrolled levitation adding to his problems, Shalby is directed to visit the institutionalised Paul and learns how Amselstein’s attempts to pierce the curtain shrouding the walls of perception have done something to the myriad levels of Reality…

With illusions both men can see battering at the walls of the asylum, Paul warns Shalby that Amselstein is waiting for him in the bowels of the Earth…

The manic quest concludes in Contact as Paul unsurprisingly claims that Shalby is Amselstein and advises him that all the answers can be found on “the Black Tug”, but the baffled convict is more concerned by the Americans who are relentlessly pursuing him. Still, in every quiet moment Shalby is forced to dwell on the incredible, unbelievable things that keep happening. Could the ravings and rantings of madmen, bad men and dead men possibly be true?

Events are closing in and during a moment of chill resignation after his faithful, enigmatic hooker abandons him too, the distraught fugitive follows her to the Reeperbahn and, during a violent confrontation, kills her pimp. With vengeful whores, low-grade criminals, cops and the ever-present CIA operatives hot on their trail, Shalby and the girl flee back to the ice-locked harbour, dodging American snipers and police boats and even a helicopter.

The frantic scene is a recipe for blockbusting disaster and when Americans shoot the pilot, the German copter crashes into the convict’s vessel. Pushed beyond all endurance, the fugitive snatches up an axe and lets the old, primal Shalby loose on the aghast US spies…

Far away in the asylum, Paul passes away peacefully as Shalby finds his long-forgotten liberator Frank dying in the copter wreckage and at last accepts whatever is to come with stoic resignation.

Grabbing a bag of Amselstein’s things, the Quantum captive walks aimlessly across the icy scene of destruction and finds a colossal derelict submarine from the last war. Almost unthinking he climbs into the depths of the Black Tug and walks into an inconceivable, inescapable conclusion his entire life has been steering him towards…

Intense, complex, lyrical, contemplative yet still excessively violent and scarily sexually charged, this gripping, mind-bending fantasy keeps the tension honed from beginning to end while constantly pushing the conceptual envelope. It’s also astonishingly lovely to look at and long overdue for reissue – preferably in one extra-long, adults-only single serving…
© 1987-1989 Albin Michel, Paris. English language editions© 1987-1989 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.

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Video Clips


By Liberatore & various (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-015-4
(1985) ISBN-10: 0874160154 Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.2 x 11 inches

Italian arts superstar Gaetano “Tanino” Liberatore was born in 1953 in Quadri in the province of Chieti. He went to school in Pescara and studied architecture at the University of Rome before moving into the world of work as an advertising illustrator in 1975.

He first met iconoclastic writer, artist and publisher Stefano Tamburini in 1978 and with strident activist cartoonist Andrea Pazienza, they created ‘Rankxerox’ for the magazine Cannibale. The character evolved and moved to Il Male and eventually Frigidaire, fully realised now as the RanXerox we know today.

Liberatore was rapidly developing as both artist and writer, with strips ‘Bordello’ and ‘Client’ appearing in Il Male, but when the new, Tamburini-scripted syndicated RanXerox became a star of French magazine L’Écho des Savanes in 1981, Tanino moved to Paris and began working simultaneously on short complete tales for the more prestigious Gallic market in such magazines as Tranfert, Métal Hurlant, À Suivre and Chic. A shocking hit in the US Heavy Metal magazine, RanXerox then led to Liberatore jumping the pond and producing material for Twisted Tales and men’s magazine Hustler.

Some of those aforementioned short fiction pieces comprise the contents of this bleakly disturbing, ultra-violent yet oddly philosophical exploration of the consuming effects of media and fashion.

When his great collaborator Tamburini died in 1986, Liberatore quit comics for nearly a decade. Returning to straight commercial illustration, he worked in movies and designed book and record covers. Eventually, comics captured his attention again, and he produced two new RanXerox tales in 1993 and 1996 (with Jean-Luc Fromental and Alain Chabat), and a piece in Batman Black and White, assorted covers, and illustrated Pierre Pelot and Yves Coppens’s mass-market paperback ‘Le Rêve de Lucy’. As the Nineties closed, he finally came storming back in stunning style with the brilliant, award-winning Lucy L’Espoir in 2007, in which he and writer Patrick Norbert freely adapted a life-story for the famous prehistoric humanoid Australopithecus Afarensis remains found by anthropologists Coppens, Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb.

Still available but desperately in need of a modern re-release, Video Clips gathers seven short, sweet and sour, vitriolic, challenging thrillers by the stylishly abrasive young Liberatore beginning with the self-authored ‘Real Vision’ in which a young celebrity-fuelled punk commits atrocious acts of violence on a mother and child simply to commit “suicide by television” after which the Tamburini-penned ‘Earth versus Saturn’ turns a wickedly sardonic eye on movie mania as a scout party for invading aliens picks the wrong bar to begin their fact finding mission. Of course, it would have helped if they hadn’t used thirties movies stars as templates for their temporary Earth-bodies…

He also scripted ‘E.M.P.S.: Erotic Management for People’s Socialism’ – an outrageous spoof of psychology, political correctness and sexual repression in a hilarious and shocking science fiction setting, whilst the deeply disturbing ‘Shut-In’ by Bruce Jones might be familiar to older American readers as it first appeared in Twisted Tales #7, detailing the saucy, savage hidden hi-jinks of a babysitter and her abusive jock boyfriend as they mischievously tend to a stroke-paralysed senior citizen one night – and of course there’s a superb sting in this tale…

‘Bololy Folly’ is another Tamburini psycho-thriller as the latest technology to tame “wild chromosomes” and bad behaviour cataclysmically comes a-cropper on live television whilst ‘Watch Out for Hot Flashes’ – scripted by the enigmatic G. Setbon – offers a more traditional tale as the world’s greatest fashion model offers an exclusive chance to the photographers who made her famous. Sadly she’s the one doing the shooting but her murderous motives simply defy all logic…

This powerfully compelling collection ends with another Tamburini tale as ‘Tiamotti’ describes the trials of three bomb-making anarchists as they try to defeat a security system which can read their minds and deliver a fusillade of withering gunfire in the blink of an eye…

Crafted in a range of palettes from tension-wracked monochrome line-art to tantalising tonal washes, and even including three lush full-colour paint jobs, this sexy, severe and staggeringly violent tome is a superb introduction to the graphic genius and brutal worlds of Liberatore: places no adult fan of sequential narrative can see without being changed forever…
Art © 1985 Gaetano Liberatore. All stories © 1985 their respective authors. English language edition © 1985 Catalan Communications, All rights reserved.