Category: Mature Reading

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Bad Habits


By Norman Dog (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 0-86719-329-8/ ISBN-13: 978-0867193299

I haven’t reviewed a straight cartoon book in a dog’s age, so here’s a rare but still readily acquirable item from an outrageous comedy original and pen-pushing veteran who’s still making America laugh-out-loud – the cooler bits anyway – with his sly, cynical and fabulously skewed outlook and observations on the Human Condition and the Things We Don’t Know Yet..

Cultural commentator Norman Dog may or may not be Raymond Larrett (it’s complicated – that’s why better carbon-based life forms than you or I invented search engines). A West Coast cartoonist whose legendary – he would say “interminable” – strip has run in the East Bay Express since 1981, Dog has been capturing with laconic brilliance the bizarre panorama of modern life for all to see and disagree with…

Describing his slick, modern and excessively hip observations on Real Americans as “Comication”, Dog has been making us foreigners, Pinko Subversive Intellectuals and other weirdoes giggle and think with every exposed home secret or shared cultural reference and seems determined not to stop.

This early volume, collecting the budding best of the strip includes ‘Let’s all go… Dance Crazy!’, ‘I Was Satan’s Plaything!’, ‘The Enchanted Toothbrush’, ‘Celebrity Breakfasts!’, ‘Suicide Hotline’, ‘The Missing Father’, ‘Hey, Stupid!’, ‘Curse of the Mysterious Horror!’, ‘A Perfectly Typical Tuesday Evening at Home With Jane and Walter’, ‘Hints for Aliens’, ‘The Punk Romance’, ‘Giant Crawling Brain!’, ‘Modern Physics for Morons’, ‘Space Sluts’ amongst literally some others and delivers high-octane, occasionally lowbrow doses of premeditated mirth in devastating, delicious, full-page monochrome pastiches of a dozen different graphic styles.

Dog/Larrett, whose work has appeared in Raw Magazine, Spin, Nickelodeon Magazine, Weirdo, Anarchy Comics, The Nation and even some other places and publications, is long overdue for a big, bold book collection, but until then, converts can catch his latest full-colour efforts in the elucidatory The 37 Cartoons You Should Read Before You Die if they so wish.

Enough Soft-Sell: go read something funny…
© 1983, 1984, 1990 Norman Dog. All rights reserved.

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Wally Gropius


By Tim Hensley (Fantagraphics Books)

ISBN: 978-1-60699-355-2
Comics are the most subversive means of communication yet devised. If you’re a creator at the top of your game with no editorial restrictions you can depict and say one thing, in a manner that even the primmest censor would approve of and adore, whilst surreptitiously advocating the most unsavoury, improper and civilisation-threatening dogma. In comics there are no “tells” to give the game away and the manner in which an author writes and draws can actually enhance the propaganda or outright lies…

Have you met young Tim Hensley?

A musician, cartoonist and second-generation comics fan, Hensley’s graphic work has popped up all over the alternative scene in such magazines as Kramer’s Ergot and Fantagraphics’ sublime anthology Mome, from where the intensely sly, brash, revolutionary and mind-bendingly beguiling Wally Gropius has emerged to challenge our every precept of Capitalist culture. This book collects those Mome moments and also includes – at no extra charge – new and revised material.

This colossal 64 page hardback – 10″x 12.5″; marvellously reminiscent of the earliest English-language Tintin albums – is illustrated in a starkly jolly, primary-coloured pastiche of Baby-Boomer kids comics – and not just the obvious and overt  Richie Rich and Archie Andrews trappings, but with a tip of the pen to lost classics of a once ubiquitous, now nearly-forgotten 1960s graphic style that ranged from Mort (Spider, Beetle Bailey) Walker and John Stanley, to the animated creations of Jay Ward and those unnamed geniuses who drew such Dell/Gold Key classics as The Little Monsters and Thirteen Going on Eighteen.

Wally Gropius is barbed and edgy teen satire: the wealthiest teenager on Earth, scion of a petrochemical dynasty, he can have anything he wants. He sings in his band The Dropouts and doesn’t have a care in the world – until his father orders him to marry “the saddest girl on Earth.” With every girl in range tearfully throwing herself at him, Wally suddenly notices the stand-offish and highly hard-to-get Jillian Banks…

Wally Gropius is a devastating, vicious and subversive satirical assault on the modern bastions of Commercialism, Celebrity, and Casual Power. Wally tries everything money can buy to win Jillian, but there’s something he’s blithely unaware of…

Wally Gropius is madcap, screwball and incredibly surreal comedy, with many hidden and time-delayed laugh-traps cunningly concealed for later effect by a keen observer with a disturbingly-honed intellect and a laudable absence of taste. Take note: Money isn’t Everything and Subtext über Alles…

Wally Gropius is Even Cleverer Than It Thinks It Is. Invest in it now and enjoy a thoroughly mature modern masterclass in mercantile mockery and morbidly Infantile Analysis.

© 2010 Tim Hensley. All rights reserved.

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Recipe For Disaster and other Stories


By Penny Van Horn (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 0-56097-330-7

Raised in Rye, New York, Penny (Moran) Van Horn worked in publishing before moving to Austin, Texas to begin her inexplicably low-key career as a cartoonist and storyteller. After years producing some of the most evocative and memorable graphic narratives of the 1990’s independent comics scene for magazines such as Weirdo, Wimmen’s Commix, Snake Eyes, Twisted Sisters and Zero Zero she now primarily works in newspaper illustration and produces a weekly strip for the Austin American-Statesman. She is also adept at painting, lettering and design and recently began experimenting with animation.

Recipe For Destruction is a collection of her early strips: deep, intense concoctions, more black than white, many crafted in her immensely labour-intensive scraperboard illustration style (see also the wonderfully mordant supernatural dark romance The Librarian), and all dwelling in the hazardous borderland between autobiography and bleakly comedic self-exploratory fantasy.

Latterly citing inspiration from such varied sources as Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett, Van Horn’s introspective retrospective begins with the eponymous ‘Recipe for Disaster’, which describes with harrowing aloofness her brief period of mental instability – her original title for the tale was “Mystical Experience or Nervous Breakdown” – before the book moves on to shorter but no less challenging fare.

‘Ten Dollars for Two Minutes’ details an unpleasant experience with her landlord, ‘Molested’ takes a slightly different glance at modern drama’s favourite plot device and ‘Catholic School’ is for anybody educated by nuns (Big ‘Hi’ to anybody else who survived Sacred Heart Convent Primary School without paying for therapy…) an utterly understandable slice of pictorial vitriol…

‘There’s No Such Thing as a Pregnant Silence’ outlines with frank and memorable humour some clear downsides to the Happy Event, ‘Binge and Purge’ reveals a different manner of addiction, ‘Domestic Bliss’ is a gloriously excessive examination of wedded bliss and ‘A Revealing Dream’ confirms that men’s suspicions of “what women want” has never been more wrong…

‘The Psycho Drifter’ is a remarkably unsettling account of modern dating, whilst ‘Texas Characters’ is plain laugh-out-loud whacky and ‘A Bird in the Beard’ returns to the subject of looking for love with more salutary comic reminiscences. The volume ends with a deeply moving cautionary tale about the heart ruling the head in ‘Mid-Life Crisis’, as well as the inclusion of some entrancingly unlovely pin-ups.

Van Horn’s work is astonishing in its captivating power and subtle influence. Her stories aren’t pretty but they are beautiful, and this collection, still in print and readily available, is one of the best grown-up comics collection around. If you believe that there’s more to strips than fights, tights and honking big guns, this book is all the proof you need.

© 1998 Penny Van Horn. All rights reserved.

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On the Odd Hours


By Eric Liberge translated by Joe Johnson (NBM ComicsLit/Louvre: Musée du Louvre Éditions)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-577-1

This is the first time I’ve encountered this series of translated graphic novels so this review is off the cuff and without any previous prejudice and preconception. That sounded pretty poncey and imposing but all it means is: even with all the high tech info systems in the world, occasionally something rather cool can slip by the most avid fan or collector.

In this case it’s the first two books in a patently fascinating collaboration between one of the greatest museums in the world and the, until so recently, scurrilous world of comics. So I’m diving right in with immediate reactions to the third in a series of superior translated bande dessinée courtesy of those fine fellows and folks at NBM.

These tales are produced in close collaboration with the forward-looking authorities of the Louvre, but this is no gosh-wow, “Night-at-the-Museum”, thinly-concealed catalogue of contents from a stuffy edifice of public culture. Rather, here is a startling, beautiful, gloriously compelling adult horror thriller that cleverly incorporates the history, geography, icons and artifacts of the Louvre into the plot and makes the historic building and its contents a vital character in the supernatural drama.

Amongst the history and information pieces at the back of the book is an article on the services for the deaf such as signed tours, and the hearing-impaired guides and lecturers who are part of the staff. This is done to complement the tale of Bastien, an angry young deaf man who turns up at the museum to begin an internship, but somehow becomes a Night Guard, with special responsibilities for The Odd Hours of the clock: those moments when the 200 year old museum slips the shackles of reality and the exhibits escape their bounds, coming to terrifying, chaotic life…

The art is stunning in this extremely adult tome, and the creeping obsessions of Bastien as he struggles to keep his daylight life alive whilst striving to resolve the mystery of the exhibits is both poignant and enthralling.

Why was he selected for the position? Why are the animated beauties and horrors of the museum so much more enticing that his increasingly strident and difficult girlfriend? Most importantly, how can animated artworks be so much more communicative than the flesh and blood inhabitants of his “normal” life?

On the Odd Hours is utterly engrossing and darkly lovely, and despite being the third in the series reads easily as a stand-alone tale. I’m definitely going to track down the preceding volumes and I strongly recommend that you all do likewise.

© 2008 Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre Éditions. English Edition © 2010 NBM. All rights reserved.

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The Search for Smilin’ Ed!


By Kim Deitch (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-324-8

Kim Deitch has been one of the leading lights of America’s Comix Underground since its earliest days, although as with Harvey Pekar and American Splendor, it is only in recent years that he has won wider acclaim: in his case with 2002’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. For the past two decades Deitch has been producing occasional short stories about a down-at-heel carnival the shabby, eccentric no-hopers that have populated it through-out the 150 years, the eerie aliens who have preserved its posterity and of course, the immortal Waldo the Cat, star of the graphic novel under review here.

In The Search for Smilin’ Ed! we have a formalised, recognisable Kim Deitch Universe – gloriously captured for your delight and delectation in a fabulous full-colour fold-out bonus feature within this comfortingly eccentric and incredibly accessible chronicle – as the author returns, albeit tangentially, to the outré characters of his fabulous Shadowland collection, expanding his ever-growing cast and still tellingly concerned with an absurdist examination of American popular culture scenarios.

With this surreal historiography of the hunt for a childhood landmark of misspent youth, the author once more shares the intoxicating joys of living in the past and dwelling in shared memories. This reassuringly weighty, mostly black and white tome leads with a terrific potted history and incisive essay, ‘Auguries of Brilliance: The Kim Deitch Universe’ by Comics scholar and educator Bill Kartapoulos, followed by the aforementioned universal crib-sheet fold-out, before the narrative wonderment unfolds in a progression of serialised episodes culled from the hallowed pages of famed alternative comics anthology Zero Zero.

One of Deitch’s most enduring characters is the irascible animated cartoon cat Waldo, who here returns to converse with the author himself as they reminisce, revel and ultimately reveal the hidden history of Smilin’ Ed, a pioneer of children’s television who mysteriously disappeared from public gaze in 1954, and was found dead on his yacht. But was he…?

Deitch’s stories are about stories – and particularly storytellers. As his authorial counterpart and the devilish Waldo converse, a cascade of mysteries are revealed when the monochrome moggy unburdens himself of his role in the vanishment, which in turn leads to a convoluted saga of fame, kidnapped boys, murdered children, fortune, a frog and demons, extraterrestrial cultural anthropologists – or voyeurs (?) – immortal pygmies and a social call to the Drawing Rooms of Hell…

Combining the utterly irresistible power of nostalgia and insatiable curiosity with science-fiction, conspiracy theory, urban history, fact and legend, show-biz razzmatazz, supernatural horror, Film Noir and a highly developed sense of the meta-real, Deitch once more weaves an irresistible spell that charms, thrills and disturbs whilst his meticulous drawing holds the reader in a deceptively fluffy, yet inescapable grip.

This volume further breaks down the thin walls of perceived reality by adding a lithograph ‘Ignacio the Bullfighter’ which was part of the narrative to the extra-textual content and also contains an all-new sequel and 21st century update, ‘Consider the Beaver’, which brings us up to date on the world of Waldo whilst delineating the forced evolution of Mankind’s potential successor. As always fact and fiction are seamlessly blended together until only a hyper-cranked search engine could discern truth from fable…

Follow the saga of the World According to Deitch in this wonderful compendium and you too could join the unfolding cartoon parade of the “Americana Way”. In Fact – or Fiction – you might already be there, but you’ll never know unless you look…

Characters, stories and artwork © 2010 Kim Deitch. All Rights Reserved.

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Black Jack volume 10


By Osamu Tezuka (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-934287-74-3

In a creative career that produced over 700 hundred different series and more than 150,000 pages (many of them only now finally becoming available to people who can’t read Japanese), Osamu Tezuka captivated generations of readers across the world with tales of history, fantasy, romance and startling adventure. Perhaps his most intriguing creation is Black Jack, an underground surgeon who overcame horrendous childhood injuries and, despite carrying many scars within and without, roams the globe, curing anybody who can pay his deliberately daunting, exorbitant prices – usually cash, but sometimes in more exotic or metaphysical coin.

He is the ultimate loner, except for Pinoko, a little girl he literally built from the organic scraps of an early case. Unlicensed by any medical board on Earth, he holds himself to the highest ethical standards possible… his own. All the troubles and wonders of this world can be found in medical dramas, and here elements of rationalism, science-fiction, kitchen sink drama, spiritualism, criminality, crushing sentimentality and shining human frailty are woven into an epic of Magical Realism to rival the works of Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez.

Black Jack is at once a lone wolf hero, troubled genius, passionate outsider and amoral humanitarian combining the indomitable will of Doc Savage with the intellect of Sherlock Holmes and ambivalent, intuitive drive of Dr. Gregory House. Hideously scarred, viciously spurning all human comfort, the unlicensed mercenary medic endures public condemnation and professional scorn, as he continually confronts the cutting edges of medicine and reality.

His esteemed creator Osamu Tezuka was born in Qsaka Prefecture on 3rd November 1928, and as a child suffered from a severe illness. The doctor who cured him inspired him to study medicine, and although the cartoonist began his professional drawing career while at university, he persevered with his studies and qualified as a doctor too.

Facing a career crossroads, Tezuka’s mother advised him to do the thing that made him happiest. He never practiced medicine but the world was gifted with such classic cartoon masterpieces as Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro-boy), Kimba the White Lion, Buddha, Adolf and literally hundreds of other graphic narratives. Along the way Tezuka incidentally pioneered, if not actually invented, the Japanese anime industry.

Equally able to speak to the hearts and minds of children and adults, Osamu Tezuka’s work ranges from the charming to the disturbing, even terrifying. In 1973 he turned his storyteller’s eye to his past college studies and created Burakku Jakku, a lone-wolf doctor living beyond society’s boundaries and rules:  a heartless mercenary miracle-worker for the right price yet still a deeply human if wounded soul who works his surgical wizardry from behind icy walls of cool indifference and casual hostility…

This tenth volume begins with ‘Avina’s Isle’ a fantastic doomed romance as a pearl diving South Sea native risks everything to marry his princess, utterly unaware of the sinister forces arrayed against him. There are some injuries no scalpel or suture can remedy…

‘The Mask Chosen’ is a revelatory tale of vengeance that cuts to the heart of Black Jack’s frightful past as the surgeon’s missing father emerges after decades with an outrageous request, whilst ‘Revenge is My Life’ shows a different side to Man’s basest instinct in a passionate, convoluted story which sees the Surgical Samurai go to superhuman lengths to repair a shattered woman with every reason to hate him.

Possibly the most moving Black Jack story yet translated, ‘Unfinished House’ reveals why a man with all the cash that the rogue doctor has earned still lives in a ramshackle hovel, a powerful tale of debts honoured and obligations met. ‘Strangers at Sea’ is a tense nautical crime drama mystically transformed by the expansive, all-encompassing, uncompromising love Dolphins display for mankind. Bring tissues: many tissues.

‘Pinoko Returns’ stars the doctor’s big-hearted little assistant who adopts a thieving conman, only to suddenly disappear without trace. Black Jack, the man with no emotions, must weigh his heart’s greatest desire against the slimmest chance of finding his pestiferous creation…

Years before drug mules became a common storytelling Maguffin ‘The Man Who Threw Up Capsules’ used the phenomenon to weave a complex tale of corrupt family practitioners and the price paid for social prestige, whilst ‘Flesh And Blood’ returns Black Jack to his dying father’s side and introduces a sister he never knew he had. Of course it cannot end well…

‘Burglary’ shows the power and weakness of utter devotion as the Super Surgeon is asked to reconstruct the unique prosthetic limbs of a total amputee. But who would steal such intensely personal items and why does Lady Jane not want her arms and legs back? ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ is a much less disturbing story: a cool, cynical caper starring a young, idealistic doctor hired by a rich old man to check the infamous medical maverick’s work. It seems the billionaire paid Black Jack a fortune to implant billions in gems inside his failing body, and now he needs to know if the notoriously greedy mercenary medic did so or just kept the loot for himself…

In Hawaii Black Jack survives a ‘Hot Night’ when an unlovable Vietnam veteran requests his expertise after he nearly killed for the third time, ‘Ransom’ sees an incomprehensible relationship blossom between a vicious kidnapper and his victim whilst ‘Mannequin and Officer’ is a story that could only happen in Japan, as a cop develops a peculiar affection for a traffic dummy. Luckily Black Jack owes him a favour…

‘Playing Doctor’ ends this volume on a high and happy note as a school bully and his favourite victim join forces to cure a little girl. Bu then, she has never met the real Black Jack…

One thing should always be remembered when reading these stories: despite all the scientific detail, all the frighteningly accurate terminology and trappings, Black Jack isn’t medical fiction; it’s an exploration of ethics and morality with medicine raised to the level of magic… or perhaps duelling. This is an epic of personal combats, a lone gunfighter battling hugely oppressive counter-forces (the Law, the System, casual human cruelty, himself) to win just one more victory: medicine as mythology, won by a Ronin with a fast car and a Gladstone bag.

Thrilling, charming, bitterly insightful and overwhelmingly moving, these addictive magical stories of a medical wizard in a cruel, corrupt and ultimately unknowable universe will shake all your preconceptions of what storytelling can be…

This book is printed in the Japanese right to left, back to front format, and also contains an excerpt from the forthcoming new edition of Osamu Tezuka’s landmark graphic biography Buddha.

© 2009 by Tezuka Productions. Translation © 2009 Vertical, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Weathercraft: A Frank Comic


By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-340-8

Some creators in the world of comics just defy description and their graphic novels and collections are beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly). Some are just so pedestrian or so mind-numbingly bad that one simply can’t face writing about them. Others are so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise and analysis can do them justice.

And then there is Jim Woodring.

Woodring’s work is challenging, spiritual, philosophical, funny, beautiful and extremely scary. And, even after reading that sentence you will have absolutely no idea of what you will be seeing the first time you read any of it.

Moreover, even if you have scrupulously followed cartoonist, Fine Artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance Man Jim Woodring’s eccentric career since his first mini-comics in 1980, or his groundbreaking Fantagraphics magazine series such as Jim (1986), the nominal spin-off Frank (of which Weathercraft is the latest fabulist, fabulous instalment), Tantalizing Stories, or the more mainstream features such as his Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse, you will still have no idea how you will respond to his newest work.

Woodring delivers surreal, abstract, wild, rational, primal cartooning: his clean-mannered art a blend of woodblock prints, Robert Crumb, Dreamscape, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria. His stories are a logical, progressional narrative clouded with multiple layers of meaning but totally void of speech or words, magnificently dependent on the intense involvement of the reader as fully active participant.

Weathercraft, for those of you who have seen his previous publications, has all the Frank regulars: the eponymous Krazy Kat-like ingénue, Pupshaw and Pushpaw, the fiercely loyal, god-like household appliances, the mysterious, omnipotent, moon-faced devil Whim and all the rest; vulture-things, frog-things, plant-things and Thing-things, that inhabit the insanely logical traumic universe of the Unifactor.

However, the action here generally follows the gross and venal Manhog (“an unholy hybrid of human ambivalence and porcine appetite”) as he/it undergoes a frantic transformative journey that marries Pilgrim’s Progress to Dr Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, and Hesse & Appelbaum’s Siddhartha with H.P. Lovecraft by way of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.

And as the journey ends – we stop watching it – has Manhog been truly been transformed? If so, for how long, and what does it matter anyway?

Woodring is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – for starters, his drawings have a distressing habit of creeping back long after you’ve put the book down and scaring the bejeezus out of you – but he is an undisputed master of the form and an innovator always distending the creative envelope. All art-forms need such creators and this evocative tome could well change your reading habits for life.

So, are you tempted, tantalized or terrified…?

© 2010 Jim Woodring. All rights reserved.

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100 Bullets: A Foregone Tomorrow


By Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-466-0

From being one of the best crime-comics in decades 100 Bullets gradually, cunningly transformed into a startlingly imaginative conspiracy thriller, with this fourth volume (collecting issues #20-30 of the much missed adult comic book) finally seeing a disparate range of previously seen strangers revealed as vital components in a vast and intriguing cast.

The tension begins with ‘The Mimic’, a captivating multi-layered allegorical vignette which features a conversation on a park bench between the mysterious Mr. Shepherd and young Benito Medici disclose some pertinent facts and intriguing conjectures about the enigmatic Agent Graves and his old associates “the Minutemen”, all whilst the life or death drama of a street corner gangsta’s life plays out to a lethal inevitable conclusion around them.

In the two-part ‘Sell Fish & Out to Sea’ “High” Jack Daw, sometime bouncer, doped-out addict and one more lost soul is offered a way to change his life with the now inescapable consequences. When he is handed a gun and those eponymous bullets he revisits all the family and friends he had left; looking for the reason he’d fallen so low. Only when he finally ascertained who was really responsible for his fall did he start using that untraceable weapon and ammunition…

East Coast gaming capitol Atlantic City is the venue for ‘Red Prince Blues’ and sees the return of super-bitch Megan Dietrich (see 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call) and ice-cold Benito, both scions of the mysterious Trust, but busily conspiring for their own unscrupulous futures as inveterate gambler Hank tries to win one last pot…

With a dying wife the last thing he needed was to get into a poker game with young Medici, but everything goes into a terminal spin when Graves, Cole Burns and Dizzy Cordova hit town. This three part saga provides more useful clues about the thirteen families that rule America, and when the head of one of those Trust clans dies after a parley with Graves the stakes are raised to a level that no one can afford…

‘Mr. Branch & the Family Tree’ returns us to Paris and Dizzy’s old instructor who unwisely reveals the secret history of The Trust and The Minutemen in a saucily novel manner; a classy yarn that sees guest artists Paul Pope, Joe Jusko, Mark Chiarello, Jim Lee, Lee Bermejo, Dave Gibbons, Tim Bradstreet, Jordi Bernet, Frank Miller and J.G. Jones supplement the always superb Eduardo Risso with a series of narrative pin-ups identifying the major players in this increasingly convoluted, compelling chronicle.

Next comes possibly the best single tale of the entire run as Agent Graves encounters a geriatric baseball star whilst delivering another briefcase. This is no mere fading star however, but a man who once wed the most glamorous movie star of her generation, a tragic woman who had an affair with a President and – apparently – took her own life. The still grieving widower is also someone a younger but just as resolute Graves left a briefcase with in early 1963…

‘Idol Chatter’ is a conspiracy nut’s dream, blending legend, myth and history into a clever, witty and punishingly poignant tale, even though the mordant black humour is never too far away…

This edgy epistle ends with the three part ‘¡Contrabandolero!’ as lowlife El Paso gas-station attendant Wylie Times meets Dizzy and Mr. Shepard before getting sucked into a crazy criminal scam to smuggle contraband from Mexico into the USA. Unfortunately things quickly go south in Juárez when the “exporter” insists that the illicit entrepreneurs also provide an over-sexed, under-age girl with a ride back to the Land of the Free…

Wylie just might be another Minuteman waiting to be reactivated, but you wouldn’t know it from this calamitous comedy of errors and terrors…

Bleak drama gradually gave way to dark gallows humour and the major characters were slowly showing softer sides but this high-octane thriller had lost of its verve with this volume. The unfolding saga remains an astoundingly accessible and readable thriller as the mystery of the Trust is revealed and Agent Graves begins the final stage of a plan decades in the making: 100 Bullets promises that the best is already here, but even better is waiting…

Entertainment starved story fans – grown-up, paid-up, immune to harsh language and unshocked by rude, very violent behaviour – should make their way to their favourite purveyor of fine fiction immediately and get these graphic novels at all costs.

© 2001, 2002 Brian Azzarello, Eduardo Risso and DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Comic Tales


By Angus McKie and others (Northern Lights Press/Titan Books)
ISBN: 0-946394-00-8

Here’s an intriguing piece of British comics history that also highlights the talents of one of our most gifted illustrators – although you’ll possibly know him as the air-brush guy who worked with Dave Gibbons on such projects as The Dome: Ground Zero, or from his work in 2000AD and the Megazine.

Angus McKie came out of the same Northern do-it-yourself-publishing and underground scene that gave us Bryan Talbot, Hunt Emerson, Alan Craddock and many others (in Britain, the North now starts just the other side of Hemel Hempstead and Watford is simply Greater London…).  He is an extremely adept and adventurous colour artist with a predilection for science fiction.

He studied graphic design at Newcastle College of Art in the 1970s before eventually working for a London agency, painting bookcovers and illustrations whilst producing intriguing strip work for various experimental comics publications such as Psst!

His most notable success was the selling of his seminal fantasy saga ‘So Beautiful, So Dangerous’ to the American adult fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, although he had previously contributed many tales to the original French parent publication Metal Hurlant.  ‘So Beautiful, So Dangerous’ became one of the strips adapted into the 1981 animated Heavy Metal movie.

In recent years he has worked extensively in the video games field.

This slim, full-colour and exceptionally readable tome is still readily available for discerning adults and features a spiffy selection of gloriously tongue-in cheek yarns. Beginning the spectacle is a political fable concocted with the assistance of Dave Huxley and Alan Craddock. ‘Wurtham View 2000’ is a creepy “big science” tale that examines the possible ramifications of a workable time-scanning television camera, and is followed by the sequel ‘Face of the Past’ which reveals its most probable uses, human nature being what it is…

More broadly comedic are the stylish gag strips ‘Tales of the Zen Masters: Nothing Exists’ and ‘Tales of the Sufi Masters’ whilst McKie displays his flair for the dramatic by working with William Shakespeare on ‘The King and I’ (that would be Lear, in case you’re wondering…). ‘The Appointment’ is an effective reinterpretation of the W. Somerset Maugham work Appointment in Samarra, and Craddock again assists on the sci fi gladiatorial spoof ‘Superhero.’

‘The Spirit of 67’ is a barbed and whacky reminiscence of past times that leads to a time travel tribulation whilst the sorry fate of two second-rate wannabe rock stars is scathingly described in ‘The Legend of the Magic Tone Box’ (written by Mike Feeney). The book ends with an extended satirical story of a misguided gang of radical anarchists with a big idea but not much of a clue in ‘Power to the People.’

McKie’s career path has taken him far from his comics roots but these little gems show an admirable disrespect for authority coupled to a highly accessible style of graphic narrative. While we’re all waiting for his next masterpiece why not track down this little gem and do a bit of time travelling of your very own?
© 1988 Junior Print Outfit.

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The World of Ginger Fox


By Mike Baron and Mitch O’Connell (Comico)
ISBN: 0-938965-02-6

Let’s all pop back to the ever-so-now 1980s with this stylish and radically different kind of graphic novel that pretty much typified and encapsulated the dichotomies of the age of Big Hair and Brash Money.

Peppertree Studios used to be one of the biggest players in Hollywood, until the somber 1970s saw ill-conceived, big, worthy movies almost bankrupt the company. Now the dissolute boys-club of greedy old men who own the company are so desperate that they hire a woman to save or kill the studio. After all, they have nothing to lose…

Amidst a welter of rumour, innuendo and open hostility, Ginger Fox blows into town and into a storm of trouble as she drags the company kicking and screaming back towards profits and safety. Along the way she encounters psychotic, crazed art-house directors, rowdy martial-arts prima donnas, drugs and thugs and sabotage from within by two-faced back-stabbers who don’t like taking orders from a pretty young woman and especially not a single-mom, Hollywood outsider…

The tale takes a swift side-step into the weird – and lavishly violent – when a Martial Arts secret society threatens to kill anybody connected with the new movie that inadvertently reveals their sacred Negative Kung Fu technique to anybody and everybody with the price of a movie ticket.

Despite warnings from cops and Hong Kong action-star Jason Wu, Ginger refuses to worry – at least until the “accidents” start to happen and the bodies start to pile up. Meanwhile, one of her own directors is trying to oust her and Peppertree’s biggest remaining star is spiraling out of control on addictive binges…

This mélange of glamour, fashion, excess and sheer over-the-top style is an unbelievably heady and enticing brew, especially thanks to the sleek, beautiful, high-end art and design of O’Connell; a canny cultural scavenger whose slick blend of caricature, pop iconography and surreal whimsy elevate this tale to unprecedented heights of verve and dash.

Sexy, cinematically violent and wickedly tongue-in-cheek, this adult comics caper is markedly different from almost anything you’ve ever seen and thoroughly deserves another bite of the graphic novel cherry. If they’re bringing back the ’80s, you’re going to need this to remind you that it wasn’t all dreadful…
Story © 1986 Mike Baron. Artwork © 1986 Mitch O’Connell. All rights reserved.