Category: Mature Reading

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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/

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.