Vatican Hustle


By Greg Houston (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-571-9

The zeitgeist of the moment seems to be nostalgia, and especially a post-modern re-examination of some of our most unfortunate cultural milestones, but at least the graphic novels that are coming out of these historic plunderings are varied and readable if not universally palatable…

Another sparkling example of the phenomenon is the potentially controversial little gem under review here from cartoonist, caricaturist, designer, educator, actor and big fan of old movies Greg Houston.

This baroque, grotesque and immensely appealing pastiche of Blaxploitation movies and the no-nonsense, in your face attitudes of the early 1970s introduces Baltimore’s coolest private eye Boss Karate Black Guy Jones, who is reluctantly commissioned by Lumpy Fargo, the city’s biggest crime boss, to rescue his wayward, dim daughter from the sticky clutches of Geech Bradford, the White Pimp…

The sordid trail leads inevitably to Rome, porn capital of the world, and, after a brief brush with the legitimate, inclusive end of skin-flicks, directly to the Vatican, long perceived among industry insiders as the source of all the really nasty freaky stuff…

Meanwhile the Pope is getting horny and anxious. Chickee Falzbar his official drug dealer and wingman is late, and the brutish, two-fisted, leather-jacketed Pontiff is looking to score some tail, kick some butt and raise a little Hell. There’s a ba-aad hassle coming and Jones is gonna need all his skills to rescue Brandi Fargo from the callous hands of God’s chosen representative on Earth…

Beneath the outrageous parody and shockingly impious (nigh slanderous) treatment of Catholic tenets and icons is a witty mystery and genuinely funny adult romp which pokes bad-tasting fun at everything from Lepers to Clowns to Hobos, college girls, the sex trade and even rock ‘n’ roll, all rendered in a busy, buzzy, black and white line that appeals and appals in equal amounts.

If you’re of a religious mien and likely to take offence at religion mocked don’t buy this book.

If you are a fan of frantic fisticuffs of fury and martial arts mayhem this ain’t the book for you neither as there practically isn’t none, but if you’re eligible to vote, open (and broad) minded, can whistle the theme to Shaft and love to laugh, this might just be your favourite book of the year…

© 2009 Greg Houston. All rights reserved.

Sand & Fury – a Scream Queen Adventure


By Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-321-7

After the groundbreaking graphic journalism of his examination of Martin Luther King (see King – a Comic Biography: the Special Edition) Ho Che Anderson has turned his talents to pure fiction in a startling and visceral re-interpretation of the legend of the banshee (or Bien Sidhe) transplanted to the cold nights and inhospitable deserts of the American west.

Against a backdrop of a serial killer stalking the area a stranded young woman is picked up by a striking woman in a fancy car. Despite her misgivings the girl soon warms to her rescuer, sharing her life and dreams. She has no idea that her life will soon end.

Whilst seeking answers to her own obscured past the driver instinctively knows she is an Angel of Death drawn to the side of people soon to die. Is she a cursed witness or somehow the facilitator? As she discovers some truths in rapid, slashes of flashbacks and jumps forward she zeroes in on the killer: someone she knew intimately.

However, when she meets another of her kind the secrets revealed only lead to a greater mystery; one infinite in scope and terrifyingly ancient in execution…

Citing Dario Argento, David Lynch, Richard Sala and Charles Burns as inspiration and with hints and overtones of Trashy Road Movies, Celtic mythology, the cosmology of H.P. Lovecraft and the modern bogeyman of Serial Killers this is a scary, sexy, gory story that heeds your full attention but delivers a devastating punch. Anderson is as much designer as illustrator and both his art and his stories are stark, powerfully arresting, even challenging concoctions.

The art, jagged black and white with judicious doses of red, isn’t prettied up and the narrative isn’t spoon fed. The reader will have to work to glean the meaning here, but the end result is more than worth the effort.

Sand & Fury © 2010 Fantagraphics Books. All content © 2010 Ho Che Anderson. All rights reserved.

Unlovable volume 2


By Esther Pearl Watson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-314-9

This arrived cold: I had never heard of the strip nor the magazine Bust where it has run for years, but as I’m always up for something new I sat down and lost myself in the world of Tammy Pierce, Texas Teen…

Ostensibly based on an actual diary the artist found in a gas-station restroom in 1995, this concluding volume resumes with the innermost thoughts, dreams and experiences of a dumpy, utterly ordinary girl surgically displayed for our examination in a catchy, breathless, effusive warts ‘n’ all style as she endures her Sophomore year of High School, from Christmas Eve 1988 to the Summer of 1989.

When you’re a teenager some things are truly timeless and universal: parents are unreasonable and embarrassing, siblings are scum and embarrassing and your body is embarrassingly finding new and horrifying ways to betray you almost daily… Your friends can’t be trusted, you’re attracted to all the wrong people and sometimes you just know that no one will ever love you…

Drawn in a two colour, faux-grotesque manner (you can call it intentionally primitive and ugly if you want) the page by page snapshots of a social hurricane building to disaster is absolutely captivating. Although this is a retro-comedy experience, behind her fatuous obsession with fashion, boys, music (equal parts Debbie Gibson and The Smiths!), social acceptance and traitorous bodily functions, Tammy is a lonely bewildered child that it’s hard not to feel sorry for. Actually it’s equally hard to like her (hell, its difficult to curb the urge to slap her at times) but that’s the point after all…

If you live long enough you’ll experience the pop culture keystones of every definitive era of your life at least twice more. The base, tasteless and utterly superficial aspects of the 1980s are currently in vogue for the current generation, which is too young to remember them – but you and I can get all nostalgic for the good bits and blithely ignore all the bad stuff: this big little hardback (408 pages, and about 15x15cm) is a delightful and genuinely moving exploration of something eternal given extra punch with the trappings of that era of tasteless self-absorption.

Like those other imaginary diarists Nigel Molesworth, Bridget Jones and Adrian Mole Tammy Pierce’s ruminations and recordings have something concrete to contribute to the Wisdom of the Ages and this book is humorous delight tinged with gentle tragedy – although that’s more in the readers apprehension of how her life eventually turned out…

Modern and Post-Ironic, Unlovable is unmissable.  Now please excuse me, I’ve got to put on my legs warmers and chunky sweater and hunt down a copy of volume 1…

© 2010 Esther Pearl Watson. All rights reserved.

Joe and Azat


By Jesse Lonergan (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-570-2

Here’s a wonderful little waste of time: cartoonist Jesse Lonergan drew upon his youthful experiences as an American Peace Corps volunteer in the nation of Turkmenistan in the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the Soviet collapse released many countries from seventy years of iron repression…

Granted autonomy and self-rule virtually overnight, a lot of Warsaw Pact countries didn’t fare well with instant democracy and Free Market Capitalism. In Turkmenistan, their new leader Turkmenbashy (with 99½ % of the vote because “everybody likes him”) was a real pip, renaming the days of the week after himself and using the nation’s entire budget to send a book of his poetry into space. In a pitifully arid country, he built a river through his capital city – because all great cities have rivers running through them. Images of the ruthless potentate are everywhere: it’s a shame nobody ever found oil in the country…

This is a charmingly subtle tale of culture shock and national misapprehensions as young Joe grapples with the outrageous differences between his liberal and wealthy homeland and the rules, laws and ingrained prejudices of a newly liberated society.

Nervous and alone the Yankee lad slowly finds a friend in the astonishingly upbeat and forward looking Azat: an ambitious convert and zealot for “The American Way”, although most of Joe’s time is spent futilely apologising and explaining that what that actually means is as far removed from the US Movies Azat is addicted to as the decades of Russian propaganda he grew up with.

Becoming almost part of the family (as complex and dysfunctional as any western one) he is caught in the tidal wave of Azat’s enthusiastic aspirations and daily frustrations, but never seems able or willing to staunch or crush them, even though he knows how hopeless they ultimately are…

Poignant, bittersweet, with an end but no conclusion, this is a superbly understated dissertation on the responsibilities and power of friendship, the poison of unattainable dreams and the unthinking cruelty of cultural imperialism, illustrated in a magically simplistic and irresistibly beguiling manner: a delight for any fan searching for more than simple jokes and action. Reading this would actually be time very well spent…

© 2009 Jesse Lonergan. All rights reserved.

The Year of Loving Dangerously


By Ted Rall & Pablo G. Callejo (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-565-8

If you live long enough you’ll experience the pop culture keystones of every definitive era of your life at least twice more. The base, tasteless and utterly superficial aspects of the 1980s are currently doing the rounds again as the current generation – which was too young to remember them – get all nostalgic for the good bits and blithely ignore all the bad stuff: same as it ever was…

…Except for Ted Rall. The contemporary essayist and American political cartoonist, like everybody who was actually there, also recalls the decade that most tellingly shaped his life and has now written a largely autobiographical graphic novel memoir for rising comics star Pablo G. Callejo to beautifully illustrate.

For us Brits it was Union-Bashing, loads-a-money, poverty, excess, daft hair and Thatcher, whilst America endured trickle-down Reaganomics, insider dealing, covert warfare and poodle rock – so nobody really got off lightly either side of the pond…

In 1984, through a series of concatenating disasters and no fault of his own (well, not too much) college student Ted Rall was expelled from Columbia University, lost his apartment and was dumped onto the streets of New York with only a couple of dollars in his pocket.

Homeless and desperate in a land with no safety-net (not much different from Britain in the 80’s, in all honesty) he faced a short, bleak future, with very few options, the best of which was jumping off the dormitory building roof…

His happy salvation came as he sat in a diner. Accidentally picking up a young woman he spent a night at her pad and discovered a new career. For nearly a year he bounced from pick-up to assignation to one-night-stand, not for cash but only bed and board.

This book follows his narrowest of escapes from poverty, addiction, sexual infection and extreme loss of self-respect as, with the dubious aid of the luckiest dope-fiend in the city, Ted claws his way back to semi-respectability and security (as a stock market trader!) by means he clearly still doesn’t quite understand decades later.

What ought to be a salutary parable about the wages of sin is actually a sincere, sensitive and immensely humane tale of triumph over adversity, free from bragging, tawdry prurience or sordid machismo and truly funny in a heartwarming manner. Rall the student gigolo is a charming, if hapless, protagonist and the non-judgemental treatment of casual sex is wonderfully refreshing, as is the good hard look at the heart and soul rather than the surface veneer of the decade.

Not a book for everybody, but rational adults with an eye to an endearing human drama will love it.

© 2009 Ted Rall & Pablo G. Callejo. All rights reserved.

Birdland


By Gilbert Hernandez (Eros Comics/Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 1-56097-200-9

This book contains stories and images of an extremely adult nature, specifically designed for adult consumption and the kind of coarse and vulgar language that most kids are fluent in by the age of ten. If reading about such things is likely to offend you, please stop now and go away. Tomorrow I’ll write about something with violence and explosions, so come back then. Please.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: if you do it right – and who does? – sex is supposed to be fun.

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

When champion of diversity Fantagraphics jumped on the smut bandwagon that proliferated in the American comics industry at the very end of the 1980s with their Eros Comics imprint, they gathered the most stylish of European and foreign adult material (such as Solano Lopez & Barreiro’s Young Witches) to complement the quality home-grown creators such as Bill Willingham and Ho Che Anderson (with their superb Ironwood and I Want to be Your Dog, respectively). In such an instance how could they not also tap major talent and socio-sexual revolutionary Gilbert Hernandez for such an “adults-only” project?

In addition to being part of the graphic and literary revolution that is Love and Rockets (where his incredibly insightful tales of Palomar and the later stories of those characters collected as Luba gained such critical acclaim) Beto has produced stand-alone tales such as Sloth, Grip and Girl Crazy, all marked by his bold, instinctive, compellingly simplified artwork and a mature, sensitive adoption of the literary techniques of Magical Realist writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez: techniques which he has added to and made his own.

All of these graphic novels – indeed all his works – have been notable for a matter-of-fact and totally explicit treatment of all aspects of sexual behaviour. It’s like he realised that everybody screws – and screws around.

In the comic miniseries Birdland collected here and tangentially linked to his earlier Heartbreak Soup and his later Luba in America material he focused on the very strange lives of two strippers, Bang Bang and Inez, providing all the nudity, hard-core action and squirty, slurpy stuff demanded by porn consumers, but also adding psychiatry, bodybuilding, realistic relationships, painful infidelities, tragedy and regret to the usually repercussion-free mix. He also couched the entire thing in a surreal, absurdist, alien-abduction mystery… Smut with a storyline – now, that’s radical…

There’s only so much rampant, recrimination-free bonking I can take (and of course I mean reading about and reviewing, not doing) and clearly Hernandez understands that too: so although the sex is literally non-stop for the insatiable devotees there’s some actual narrative shoved in to be getting on with whilst readers are catching their breath…

Utterly adults-only, this book reprints the black and white miniseries, the short tale ‘Tierra de Pajaro’ from the Free Speech benefit comic True North #2 and a copious quantity of bonus material, and fans might recognise some of the work as having featured heavily in the recent Best Erotic Comics 2009.
© 1990, 1991, 1992 Gilbert Hernandez. All rights reserved.

King – a Comic Biography: The Special Edition


By Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-310-1

There are books to read, books you should read – and some perhaps, that you shouldn’t – and there are important books. The relatively new field of graphic novels has many of the first but precious few important books yet.

It’s hard enough to get noticed within the industry (simply excelling at your craft is not enough) but when we do generate something wonderful, valid, powerful, true to our medium yet simultaneously breaking beyond into the wide world and making a mark, the reviews from that appreciative greater market come thick and fast – so I’m not going to spend acres of text praising this superb, controversial and unique examination of the man that lived beside – not “behind” or “within” the myth of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Over the course of ten years (1993-2002) young Canadian cartoonist Ho Che Anderson struggled to produce three comics books that offered another perspective of a man who was as much sinner as saint, but whose determination, passion, energy and sheer luck drove a cleansing wedge into a rotting, repressive, stifled society and succeeded in opening enough doors for America’s racial underclass, so that forty years later a black American can govern the World’s greatest superpower.

Not that four decades is so brief an interlude: but than again, how many European or white Commonwealth countries can boast that their highest echelons of power have made even that much progress?

In both stark black and white and mesmerising colour, Anderson uses all the strengths and tools of sequential narrative to reveal, relate, question and challenge the oft-recounted facts of the Georgia Pastor’s life in this magnificent volume, released to celebrate Barack Obama’s – and the American people’s – landmark achievement. Gathered within are those hard-crafted three issues, extra and deleted scenes, the thematically linked one-shot Black Dogs and many other extras in one compelling tome, with a fascinating overview from Anderson; sketches and reminisces, a treatise on his working practises and a gallery of related art.

This is a true historical examination and a perfect example of comics at its most effective – biography not hagiography – and as important a landmark achievement for our art-form as Maus, Safe Area Goražde or American Splendor, Watchmen, Pride of Baghdad or Persepolis. Whenever and wherever we have to defend our Art from decriers and peddlers of prejudice, King will be one of the paltry few examples that cannot be contradicted or ignored. It’s a book no thinking fan can afford to miss.
King: The Special Edition © 2010 Fantagraphics Books. All content © 2010 Ho Che Anderson. All rights reserved.

Newave!- The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980’s


Edited by Michael Dowers (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-313-2

Everybody has at some stage in their lives used pictures to tell stories. It’s a fundamental step in the cognitive development of children and for some of us that magic never goes away. For most people the crushing weight of the world squelches the joy of creation so that we become observers and consumers rather than makers, but a privileged few carry on: drawing, exploring, and in some cases, where technology allows, producing and sharing.

This book explores, recounts and celebrates those driven artisans who came out of the “anything goes” 1960s and 1970s Underground Comix movement, craving a vehicle of expression, not caring about money, and with enough time to draw – or gather – artwork (mini comics people are notoriously generous, contributing work at the drop of a hat: just check out the huge array of notable creators listed below) before laboriously photocopying, cutting, folding, stapling and then distributing the miniscule but marvellous results.

Just by way of definition: most mini comix were home produced pamphlets using borrowed or when necessary paid for print processes. The most popular format was an 8½ x 11inch sheet, folded twice, and printed at local copy-shops (or made on school/work repro systems like early Xerox, Photostat, Mimeo or Spirit Banda machines) on letter-size – or any – paper. Because they weren’t big, they were called mini comix. Duh!

Although this book concentrates on a specific time, place and creative ethos, the phenomenon was truly world-wide and covered all genres from superhero knock-offs to the sexually explicit, violent, political and drug-related work that typified Newave! Nobody who wanted to and had access to the technology ever resisted making their own comics…

In this 892 page collection the many craftsmen who began the tradition that led inexorably to today’s thriving Alternative and Small Press publishing movements as well as the current internet comics phenomenon, discuss at length their motives and methods, and naturally the best of that adventurous decade are reprinted in crisp black and white.

Among the hundreds, (thousands?) of people who have made or contributed to mini comix many have gone on to more well-received and popular things. Some of them include (and feel free to save time, skip this section and just buy the book) Jeff Gaither, Michael Roden, Wayno, Artie Romero, Brad Foster, Fred Hembeck, Mary Fleener, The Pizz, Rick Geary, Dennis Worden, Steve Willis, Roy Tompkins, Tom Christopher, XNO, Clay Geerdes, Bob X, Jim Siergey, J.R. Williams, Jim Blanchard, Norman Dog, Molly Kiely, Mack White, Daniel Clowes, Doug Allen, Art Penn, Sam Henderson, Gary Whitney, George Erling, Bob Vojtko, Doug Potter, David Miller, Jim Ryan, Par Holman, Roger May, Meher Dada, Wayne Gibson, Tom Motley, Marc Arsenault, Ion, Bruce Chrislip, Dale Luciano, C. Bradford Gorby, Robin Ator, Douglas O’Neil, C. E. Emmer, Kurt Wilcken, Doug Holverson, Jamie Alder, Tom Hosier, Steven Noppenberger, W.C. Pope, Jim Gillespie, John Howard, Tucker Petertil, Gary Lieb, Bob Conway, and Jim Thompson.

I’ve done it myself, for fun – even once or twice for actual profit – and it’s an incredible buzz (I should note that I have a wife not only tolerant but far more skilled and speedy in the actual “photocopy, cut, fold, staple” bit and willing, if not keen, to join in just so she could see the oaf she married occasionally…)

The sheer boundless enthusiasm and joy of making comics is celebrated in this astonishingly vast, incredibly heavy and yet still pocket-sized hardback collection, with over 700 pages of the very best of that decade’s adult cartoons on show, accompanied by not just historical information on key publishers such as Brad Foster, Artie Romero, Steve Willis, Dennis Worden, Bob X, J.R. Williams, Roger May, Tom Hosier, George Erling, Bob Vojtko and others but also a list of website addresses so you can check out how the compulsion to create has survived into the 21st century.

A joy for every fan of the art-form: as long as they’re old enough to vote and strong enough to lift the thing.
Newave!- The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980’s © 2010 Michael Dowers and Fantagraphics Books. All contents © 2010 their respective creators. All rights reserved.

Pride & Joy


By Garth Ennis & John Higgins (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-803-7

Garth Ennis has a well deserved reputation for shocking, moving and wickedly funny storytelling, and is accomplished in blending genres for maximum effect, as his successes with Preacher, Hellblazer, True Faith and a dozen other tales will attest.

One of his least regarded – in my opinion unjustly so – is this saga of a painfully domestic world turned upside down by an unredeemed past. It is a story of dreadfully ordinary folk with none of the baroque or flamboyant characters that populate regular fiction.

There’s this guy called Jimmy Kavanagh. His wife is long-dead, his son Patrick is at that revolting sulky teen age, but at least his little daughter Rachel is still the most beautiful girl in the whole world. Life is hard: his own dad, a war-hero, has just passed on, but the family are doing okay…

That all changes when Jimmy’s stupid past resurfaces. In 1972 he and a couple of his idiot friends dreamed they were going to be big-time hoods when they agreed to rip-off a gang boss. The gig had been planned by the boss’ bodyguard, Stein, who promised them a million dollars… Unfortunately for everybody but Jimmy, his pals were real shmucks, and cocked up the caper. Cops arrived, busted Stein before he could kill them all and took him away for twenty-to-life.

Scared straight by the experience, Jimmy got on with his life – until now. One night he gets a call and his world starts to implode. Coming home to finds the babysitter gutted like a fish. Stein is out and he wants revenge…

Gathering his kids and linking up with his old “colleagues” they go on the run together, but the hunter can’t be shaken and innocent people keep dying. Unable to bond with his son during their entire life together Jimmy finally, tragically connects with Patrick as the sorry saga comes to a small and dirty close…

With chilling echoes of Cape Fear (the 1962 Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum version) this tale seeks to examine how ordinary people cope with ordinary evil: a cheap thug with a knife is just as deadly as a horde of vampires. You and your family can only die once – painfully, horribly; but just once. Pride and Joy is a tale about dreams and heritage and shows how mediocre people cope, illustrated with perfect subtle understatement by John Higgins. Nothing about this story is big or bold or bombastic: but it could really happen. It’s That Scary…

© 1997, 2004 Garth Ennis and John Higgins. All Rights Reserved.

Vamps


By Elaine Lee and Will Simpson (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-220-2

As a long overdue antidote to the deluge of lovey-dovey, kissey-poo tales of forbidden love between innocent modern maids and moody, tragic carriers of the Curse of the Night’s Children, here’s a reminder of a different sort of Vampire Tale – one that is sleazy, nasty and very, very scary…

Vampires are heartless, bloodsucking raptors that wander the night, slaughtering whomever they wish. In this story set in the Badlands of modern America, they’re still generally regarded as creatures of myth, but apart from not turning into bats all the usual movie lore applies: fast, strong, non-reflective, scared of stakes and sunlight. The big new wrinkle is that blood gets them crazy-dumb drunk…

Our epic ride follows the liberating run of five hungry, hot and horny undead bad-girls called Screech, Whipsnake, Skeeter, Mink and Howler who begin their longed-for emancipation by finally killing Dave, the male Vamp who “turned” them all, then lorded it over them like a fat and lazy lion in a savannah Pride. After staking and dismembering him the girls go on a wild spree across the States, riding Harley’s down Hell’s highways, killing bikers and ne’er-do-wells (and the odd innocent bystander) wherever they find them.

They’re completely unaware that one of them has been manipulating her sisters all along and orchestrating the seemingly random slaughter. As a private detective and Howler’s psychic – and still breathing – sister Jenny tracks them, the pack hits Las Vegas and we discover that when she was alive Howler was a stripper whose baby was taken from her by a corrupt judge and sold in a black market adoption deal. Dave’s destruction, the road-rage, everything has been a plan to get her baby back.

All the pieces and pursuers are headed for a bloody crash and climax when Howler finally locates her son, but there’s an unwelcome complication: Dave has pulled himself together and is really, really annoyed…

Far more True Blood than Twilight (and predating both by more than a decade) this fast-paced, sardonic and gorily wild ride of love and death is a spectacular and absorbing riot by two of the industry’s best and most unsung talents: sordid, sexy and totally compelling, riddled with far deeper metaphors than “unrequited love sucks”, Vamps is a solid reminder that there are such things as monsters and some beasts just won’t be tamed…
© 1994, 1995 DC Comics.  All Rights Reserved.