Category: Satire/Politics

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Black Jesus volume 1


By Jimmy Blondell & David Krintzman, Nicholas Da Silva & Bigjack Studios (Brazil)  (Arcana)
ISBN: 978-1-897548-55-4 (TPB)

I’m always keen to spark a little controversy, so here’s an intriguing parable you probably missed when it launched in 2009 or the last time we plugged it. Moreover, remember as you proceed that even worse than being oppressed, deliberately deprived or “othered” is being denied your own existence…

Superheroes are often cited as a new mythology and occasionally comic books dabble with the idea that there’s not much difference between gods and metahumans. In a world where unnatural powers are common currency – at least in our fictions and entertainments and certain religions – what happens when a genuinely different being appears and acts in ways neither the guardians of society nor the laws of physics will tolerate?

Conceived and written by Jimmy Blondell & David Krintzman with art from Nicholas Da Silva (assisted by Brazil’s Bigjack Studios) this gripping thriller presents all the facets of an urban/horror/conspiracy thriller but don’t be fooled. There’s more going on here than first appears…

Chris is a young black man in New York City. He’s a bit weird, and not just because of the recurrent nasty visions of cruel hunters slaughtering animals in the Serengeti. Chris lives a peaceful life in a city where criminality, intolerance and hostility are everywhere, harming no one and caring for his pigeons in their rooftop roost.

He’s got friends, a part-time job and plenty of questions about the strange things that keep happening around him. Case in point: despite never practising, he can score a basket from anywhere on the court without even trying. It’s a trick that’s earned the respect of violent angry young men throughout the neighbourhood. When he’s not anywhere else the loner spends time breaking into Central Park Zoo to feed animals, or studying with scholarly Rabbi Goldberg, a man who knows more about the boy’s past than he’s letting on…

An already complex existence takes a frantic turn the day Chris pulls some kids out of a car sinking into the Park Lake. He had to walk across the water to get to them and footage of the rescue made the news everywhere. Thankfully, he kept his hoodie up and most viewers don’t know who he is. That’s not a problem for the devout leader of the Black Christian Gang whose agenda is to reclaim the Messiah for people of colour and destroy forever the myth of a blond, blue-eyed white Christ. He sets his many brothers in the BCG to finding the miracle worker at all costs…

So does black televangelist Reverend Carnivean, whose millions of worshippers, billions of dollars and soaring political ambitions can’t afford such obvious competition. Rather than true believers, he sets his moneymen, whores and assassins to finding the mystery man the media have dubbed Black Jesus…

That becomes even more urgent after a second tragedy strikes and witnesses at a charity gala all report seeing an anonymous young black waiter heal a woman mauled by a lion…

So begins the frantic race to control a potentially divine force or the next stage in human evolution: a trail peppered with bodies and shocking outrages. Of course, it doesn’t help that Chris himself has no idea what he truly is…

Understated and thoughtful, Black Jesus is a thriller about being born different (and yes, I do think that’s a metaphor for being black in America today, and as much so here too and France and…) and exploring dangerous ideas about the nature of divinity, poverty, status and belonging. It also has a strong shot at attempting to debunk the biggest and most divisive lie in politico-religious history.

The series was delving into some truly interesting corners before slumping into a hiatus triggered by the project being optioned as movie. Maybe when the film is finished, we can finally see how the comic would have progressed from the conclusion – but not ending – it reached…

Certainly not for everyone, but smart and compelling enough for you perhaps?

I mention just as an interesting aside here that I googled this book and their fancy-schmancy AI butted in on my digging to say it didn’t exist.

It does.

Check Good Reads, for example, and then buy a copy and read it
© 2009 by Black Jesus LLC. All rights reserved.

Today in 1904 pulps legend and Silver Age Superman, Batman & Legion of Super-Heroes writer Edmond was born. Thirty years later France and most of Europe welcomed the first issue of Disney vehicle Le Journal de Mickey.

In 1995 we grieved the loss of maestro Jesús Blasco whose The Steel Claw: The Cold Trail made devotees of many when we reviewed it.

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Chas Addams Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of You


By Charles Addams (Simon & Schuster)
ISBN: 978-1-43910-356-2 (PB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times. It also has Discriminatory Content included for comedic and satirical effect.

Cartoonist Charles Samuel Addams (1912-1988) was a distant descendant of two American Presidents (John Adams & John Quincy Adams). He compounded that hereditary infamy by perpetually making his real life as extraordinary as his dark, mordantly funny drawings.

Born into a successful family in Westfield, New Jersey, the precocious, prankish, constantly drawing child was educated at the town High School, Colgate University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York City’s Grand Central School of Art, and apparently spent the entire time producing cartoons and illustrations for a raft of institutional publications.

In 1932 he became a designer for True Detective magazine – “retouching photos of corpses” – and soon after started selling drawings to The New Yorker. In 1937, at the peak of popular fascination in cinematic and literary horror stories, he began a ghoulish if not outright macabre sequence of family portraits that ultimately became his signature creation. However, during WWII, he toned down the terror and served with the US Signal Corps Photographic Center, devising animated training films for the military.

Whether Addams artfully manufactured his biography to enhance his value to feature writers or was genuinely a warped and wickedly wacky individual is irrelevant, although it makes for great reading – especially the stuff about his wives – and, as always, the internet is eager to be your informative friend…

What is important is that in all the years he drew and painted those creepily sardonic, gruesome gags and illustrations for The New Yorker, Colliers, TV Guide and so many others, he beguiled and enthralled his audience with a devilish mind and a soft, gentle approach that made him a household name long before television turned his characters into a hit. This was a substantial part of what generated the craze for monsters and grotesques that lasts to this day. That eminence was only magnified once the big screen iterations debuted. And now we have streaming fun too. He would have loved the sheer terrifying inescapability of it all…

As he worked on unto death, Addams got even wackier: marrying his third wife in a pet cemetery, spending an absolute fortune collecting weapons and torture devices – “for reference don’cha know” – and inventing… recipes…

There will be more on that last one another time but what really matters is that older collections of his oeuvre are finally being unearthed. This one – compiled from Addams’s personal archive, with many previously unpublished gems, explores the widest gamut of emotion, from ecstatic love to disappointed affection to murderous obsession. It’s a creepy corker demonstrating that love really does hurt…

Chas Addams Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of You opens in full scholar mode with ‘Chas Addams’ a photo-essay appreciation by H. Kevin Miserocchi, backed up by an explanation of the work of the ‘Tee and Charles Addams Foundation’ – remembering of course that the Tee here is his truly kindred spirit third wife Marilyn Matthews Miller-Addams (1926–2002).

Then the cartoon carnival commences with early works as ‘In the Beginning’ sets the cultural scene with crime, terror, murder and the ever-lurking supernatural before the remainder of the perilous pictorium offers insights into what used to be called “the war of the sexes”. This socially sensitive selection judiciously deals even handedly with ‘His Side’ and ‘Her Side’ before going on to test ‘His Resolve’ and ‘Her Resolve’…

The matter is naturally settled in revelatory style with ‘The Final Score’…

For clarity and pure knowledge this hilariously judgemental tome closes with a full list of ‘Dates of First Publication’ and the happy confirmation that a goodly proportion of the gags are new/unpublished until this time.

Should you not be as familiar with his actual cartoons as with the big and small screen legacy Addams unleashed, you really owe it to yourself to see the uncensored brilliance of one of America’s greatest humourists. It’s dead funny…
© 2006 by Tee and Charles Addams Foundation. All rights reserved.

Today in 1897 English writer & cartoonist Charles Henry Ross died. He’s one of the chaps accused of inventing comics with his disreputable rogue Ally Sloper. The closest we’ve got yet to exposing that rapscallion was in Great British Comics.

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O Josephine!


By Jason (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-210-6 (HB/digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic, comedic and ironic effect.

Born in 1965 in Molde, Norway, John Arne Sæterøy is known globally by his enigmatic, utilitarian nom de plume Jason. The shy & retiring auteur started on the path to international cartoon superstardom in 1995, once first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won Norway’s biggest comics prize: the Sproing Award.

From 1987 he had contributed to alternate/indie magazine KonK while studying graphic design and illustration at Oslo’s Art Academy. From there he went on to Norway’s National School of Arts and, after graduating in 1994, founded his own comic book Mjau Mjau. Constantly refining his style into a potent form of meaning-mined anthropomorphic minimalism, Jason cites Lewis Trondheim, Jim Woodring & Tex Avery as primary influences. Moving to Copenhagen Jason worked at Studio Gimle alongside Ole Comoll Christensen (Excreta, Mar Mysteriet Surn/Mayday Mysteries, Den Anden Praesident, Det Tredje Ojet) & Peter Snejbjerg (Den skjulte protocol/The Hidden Protocol, World War X, Tarzan, Books of Magic, Starman, Batman: Detective 27).

His efforts were internationally noticed, making waves in France, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Germany and other Scandinavian countries as well as the Americas. He won another Sproing in 2001 – for self-published series Mjau Mjau – and in 2002 turned nigh-exclusively to producing graphic novels. He won even more major awards.

Jason’s breadth of interest is wide and deep: comics, movies, animated cartoons, music, literature and pulp fiction all feature equally with no sense of rank or hierarchy. This puckish and egalitarian mixing and matching of inspirational sources always and inevitably produces picture-treatises well worth a reader’s time. Over a succession of tales Jason built and constantly re-employed a repertory company of stock characters to explore deceptively simplistic milieux based on classic archetypes distilled from movies, childhood entertainments, historical and literary favourites. These all role-play in deliciously absurd and surreal sagas centred on his preferred themes of relationships and loneliness. Latterly, Jason returned to such “found” players as he built his own highly esoteric universe, and even has a whole bizarre bunch of them “team-up” or clash…

As always, visual/verbal bon mots unfold in beguiling, sparse-dialogued, or even as here silently pantomimic progressions, with compellingly formal page layouts rendered in a pared back stripped-down interpretation of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style: solid blacks, and thick outlines dominating settings of seductive monochrome simplicity augmented by a beguiling palette of stark pastels and muted primary colours.

The majority of his tales brim with bleak isolation, swamped by a signature surreality: largely populated with cinematically-inspired, darkly comic, charmingly macabre animal people ruminating on those inescapable concerns whilst re-enacting bizarrely cast, bestial movie tributes.

A master of short-form illustrated tales, many Jason yarns were released as snappy little albums perfect for later inclusion in longer anthology collections like this one which gathers a quartet of his very best.

Here the stream of subtle wonderment opens with a suitably understated autobiographical jaunt to the land of Erin and an uneventful but truly mind-blowing progression along ‘The Wicklow Way’. The vacation hikes might be scenic and uneventful, but you’re never alone as long as you’re stuck inside your own head…

With the addition of a jaundiced inky outlook (and employing “yellow journalism” of the most literal kind) ‘L. Cohen: A Life’ then outlines the experiences and times of the poet, musician and philosopher, with a strong emphasis on whimsical inaccuracy and factual one-upmanship, whilst cinematic classicism underpins ‘The Diamonds’ wherein a pair of softened and barely-boiled detectives lose all objectivity after their scrupulous surveillance of a simple family affects their own hidden lives…

The low-key dramatics slip back into monochrome and into the twilight zone after weary world traveller Napoleon Bonaparte returns to Paris and falls head over shiny heels for infamous exotic dancer Josephine Baker. As with all doomed romances, the path to happiness is rocky, dangerous, and potentially insurmountable, but… c’est l’amour!

These comic tales are strictly for adults but allow us all to look at the world through wide-open childish eyes, exploring love, loss, life, death, boredom and all aspects of relationship politics without ever descending into mawkishness or simple, easy buffoonery. His buffoonery is always slick and deftly designed for maximum effect.

Jason remains a taste instantly acquired: a creator any true fan of the medium should move to the top of their “Must-Have” list.
All characters, stories, and artwork © 2019 Jason. This edition © Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

Today in 1913 comics legend Joe Simon was born. I’m sure you’ve read all those great books he & Jack Kirby co-created, but if you haven’t, why not try The Sandman by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby?

In 1957 French comics genius Edmond-François Calvo died. You can not until you read his masterwork La Bête Est Mort which we reviewed as The Beast is Dead: World War II Among the Animals and will probably do again real soon.

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Secret of San Saba: A Tale of Phantoms and Greed in the Spanish Southwest


By Jack Jackson (Kitchen Sink Press)
ISBN: 978-0-87816-080-8 (HB) 978-0-87816-081-5 (Album TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times. This book also includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.

I’m reading most of my graphic novels digitally these days, and it’s clear how much superb classic material – especially genre works with war and western themes – still isn’t much of a priority to content providers yet.

You try tracking down Sam Glanzman’s The Haunted Tank or Joe Kubert Sgt. Rock compilations, or even a relatively well-exposed screen property like Jonah Hex (other than the admittedly superb Justin Grey/Jimmy Palmiotti books of recent vintage) and see what joy you get…

One of the most cruelly digitally excluded omissions is this stunningly impressive western horror mash-up from the inimitable Jack Jackson, still tragically only available in the original oversized (277 x 201 mm) monochrome softcover and hardback album editions, as originally published by Kitchen Sink as part of their Death Rattle Series.

Known as ‘Jaxon’ since his Underground Commix heyday, Jackson’s infectious fascination with the history of Texas is a signature of much of his work even from the earliest days. Here he expertly combines a love of historical documentary with the fabulous Lovecraftian horrors of the cosmic void, resulting in a breathtaking and wonderful period supernatural thriller, skillfully woven into the fabric and lore of the Southwest desert lands…

When a silvery entity crashes to Earth in a blazing fireball, it galvanises the fading dreams of Xotl, a young Faraone warrior who has lost faith in his gods.

As years pass, native worship of the fearsomely fulgent power exhibited by the star-fallen thing grows, and when the mighty Apaches conquer the Faraone, the twice-defeated tribe turn to the newly arrived Europeans for help. This is a tragic, fatal mistake, albeit revealed too late… after the tribe finds that Priests and Colonists might speak of God but only truly worship wealth…

Crucially, when the newcomers learn of the Cosmic Slug that fell from the stars, all they can see is the overwhelming wealth its silver mantle represents…

The decades-long battle between Apaches and Missionaries to control the slimy silver wellspring makes for a powerful – if cynical – tale; one full of the intoxicating artistry, spellbinding storytelling, and the mesmerising aura of authenticity that is Jackson’s most telling narrative tool. It’s all based on the ancient Texas stories and legends of ‘Blanco’ and ‘Negro Bultos’ (supernatural treasure mounds): a most fantastic story which should be, has to be true, if only because Jackson has drawn it. Moreover, it has inexplicably dropped out of print and has never been picked up for a movie. That alone is something really strange and sinister…

Superbly compelling, this is a must-read item for any serious fan of both comics and horror fiction, so let’s have it back and out in every format possible, pretty please?
© 1989 Jack Jackson. All rights reserved.

Today in 1897 Enid Blyton’s Noddy illustrator was born. Sadly we’ve got nothing on Dutch master Harmsen van der Beek so you’ll need to buy one of the books if you can. We can however recommend a bunch of stuff by Harvey Pekar, who was born today in 1939: gems like American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar. Contemporary graphic novelist James Sturm was born today in 1965; he authored The Golem’s Mighty Swing and other stuff like The Revival, Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules and Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight which I’ll get around to one day.

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The Complete Peanuts volume 1: 1950-1952


By Charles Schulz (Canongate Books/Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-589-2 (Fantagraphics HB) 978-1-60699-763-5 (Fantagraphics TPB) 978-1-84767-031-1 (Canongate)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: All that’s great about cartoon strips… 10/10

Peanuts is unequivocally the most important comics strip in the history of graphic narrative. It is also the most deeply personal. Today in 1950 it all began, and cartoonist Charles M Schulz went on crafting his moodily hilarious, hysterically introspective, shockingly surreal philosophical epic for half a century: 17,897 strips spanning October 2nd 1950 to February 13th 2000.

He died from complications of cancer the day before his last strip was printed.

At its height, Peanuts ran in 2,600 newspapers, in 21 languages and in 75 countries. Many of those venues still run it as perpetual reprints, and have ever since his death. During Schulz’s lifetime, book collections, a merchandising mountain and television spin-offs had made the publicity-shy doodler an actual billionaire at a time when that really meant something…

None of that matters. Peanuts – a title Schulz loathed, but one the syndicate forced upon him – changed the way comics strips were received and perceived: proving cartoon comedy could have edges and nuance and meaning as well as soon-forgotten pratfalls and punchlines.

Following a typically garrulous, charming and informative Introduction from fellow Minnesotan Garrison Keillor, this mammoth (218 x 33x 172 mm) landscape compendium offers the first two and a bit years. Here a prototypical, rather outgoing and jolly Charlie Brown and high-maintenance mutt Snoopy joined with bombastic Shermy and mercurial Patty in hanging out doing kid things.

These include playing, playing pranks, playing sports such as tennis, golf and baseball, playing musical instruments, teasing each other, making baffled observations and occasionally acting a bit too much like grown-ups. Fans of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes will feel eerie familiarity with much of the hijinks and larks of these episodes.

As new characters Violet, infant prodigy Schroeder, and Lucy and her strange baby brother Linus were added to the mix, the boisterous rush of the series began to imperceptibly settle into a more contemplative pace. Charlie Brown began to adopt and embrace his eternal loser, singled-out-by-fate persona and the sheer diabolical wilfulness of Lucy began to sharpen itself on everyone around her…

The first Sunday page debuted on January 6th 1952; a standard half-page slot offering more measured fare than the daily. Both thwarted ambition and explosive frustration became part of the strip’s signature denouements…

By the end of 1952, all those the rapid-fire gags had evolved from raucous slapstick to surreal, edgy, psychologically barbed introspection, garnished by crushing judgements and deep rumination in a world where kids – and certain animals – were the only actors. The relationships, however, were increasingly deep, complex and absorbing even though “Sparky” Schulz never deviated from his core message: entertain…

David Michaelis then celebrates and deconstructs ‘The Life and Times of Charles M. Schulz’ after which Gary Groth & Rick Marschall conduct ‘An Interview with Charles M. Schulz’, rounding out our glimpse of the dolorous graphic genius with intimate revelations and reminiscences whilst a copious ‘Index’ offers instant access to favourite scenes you’d like to see again.

Readily available in hardcover, paperback and digital editions, this initial volume offers a rare example of a masterpiece in motion: comedy gold and social glue gradually metamorphosing in an epic of spellbinding graphic mastery which became part of the fabric of billions of lives, and which continues to do so long after its maker’s passing.

Happy ever afters, kids.
The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952 (volume 1) © 2004 Peanuts Worldwide, LLC. Introduction © 2004 Garrison Keillor. “The Life and Times of Charles M. Schulz” © 2000 David Michaelis. “Interview with Charles M. Schulz” © 2004 Gary Groth and Richard Marschall. All other material copyright its respective owners. All rights reserved.

Today in 1909 Alex Raymond was born. You’ll know him best for stuff like Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo volume 1: Sundays 1934-1937 (The Complete Flash Gordon Library. In 1916 Bob Powell, was born. He went on to do things like Bob Powell’s Complete Jet Powers.

Ramona Fradon was born in 1926, and Spirou stalwart Janry arrived in Belgium in 1957, whilst Maltese docu-comics journalist Joe Sacco was born in 1960. You can find dozens of books by the first two just by using a search box here, and I’ve almost summoned enough nerve to review Sacco’s Palestine despite – or because of – these febrile times…

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Addams and Evil


By Charles Addams (Methuen/Mandarin)
ISBN: 978-0-413-55370-1 (Album PB) 978-0-413-57190-8 (Album HB) 978-0-413-55370-6 (Mandarin TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times. This book also includes Discriminatory Content included for comedic and satirical effect.

Charles Samuel Addams (1912 – 1988) was a cartoonist and distant descendant of two American Presidents (John Adams & John Quincy Adams) who made his real life as extraordinary as his dark, mordantly funny drawings.

Born into a successful family in Westfield, New Jersey, the precocious, prankish, constantly drawing child was educated at the town High School, Colgate University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York City’s Grand Central School of Art, and apparently spent the entire time producing cartoons and illustrations for a raft of institutional publications.

In 1932 he became a designer for True Detective magazine – “retouching photos of corpses” – and soon after began selling drawings to The New Yorker. In 1937 he began creating ghoulish if not outright macabre family portraits that become his signature creation. During WWII, he served with Signal Corps Photographic Center, devising animated training films for the military.

Whether he artfully manufactured his biography to enhance his value to feature writers or was genuinely a warped and wickedly wacky individual is irrelevant, although it makes for great reading – especially the stuff about his second wife – and, as always, the internet awaits the siren call of your search engine…

What is important is that in all the years he drew and painted those creepily sardonic, gruesome gags and illustrations for The New Yorker, Colliers, TV Guide and so many others, he managed to beguile and enthral his audience with a devilish mind and a soft, gentle approach that made him a household name long before television turned his characters into a hit and generated a juvenile craze for monsters and grotesques that lasts to this day. That eminence was only magnified once the big screen iterations debuted. And now we have streaming fun too. He would have loved the sheer terrifying inescapability of it all…

This stunningly enticing volume is a reissue of his second collection of cartoons, first published in 1947, and semi-occasionally since then. It’s still readily available if you’ve a big bank book, but the time is ripe for a definitive collected edition, or better yet a reissue of his entire canon (eleven volumes of drawings and a biography) either in print or digitally.

Should you not be as familiar with his actual cartoons as with their big and small screen descendants you really owe it to yourself to see the uncensored brilliance of one of America’s greatest humourists. It’s dead funny…

© 1940-1947 the New Yorker Magazine, Inc. In Canada © 1947 Charles Addams.

Today in 1909, fearless campaigner/cartoonist turned arch conservative Al Capp was born. Slightly less contentious than Li’l Abner, his Fearless Fosdick might be more to your taste.

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Athos in America


By Jason, coloured by Hubert, translated by Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-478-8 (HB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced for dramatic, comedic and ironic effect.

Born in 1965 in Molde, Norway, John Arne Sæterøy is known globally by his enigmatic, utilitarian nom de plume Jason. The shy & retiring draughts-scribe started on the path to international cartoon superstardom in 1995, once first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won Norway’s biggest comics prize: the Sproing Award. Prior to that, he had contributed to alternate/indie magazine KonK whilst, from 1987, studying graphic design and illustration at Oslo’s Art Academy, before going on to Norway’s National School of Arts. After graduating in 1994, three years later he founded his own comic book Mjau Mjau, citing Lewis Trondheim, Jim Woodring & Tex Avery as primary influences, and constantly refining his style into a potent form of meaning-mined anthropomorphic minimalism.

Moving to Copenhagen Jason worked at Studio Gimle alongside Ole Comoll Christensen (Excreta, Mar Mysteriet Surn/Mayday Mysteries, Den Anden Praesident, Det Tredje Ojet) and Peter Snejbjerg (Den skjulte protocol/The Hidden Protocol, World War X, Tarzan, Books of Magic, Starman, Batman: Detective 27). His efforts were internationally noticed, making waves in France, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Germany and other Scandinavian countries as well as the Americas. He won another Sproing in 2001 – for self-published series Mjau Mjau – and from 2002 turned nigh-exclusively to producing graphic novels, and won even more major awards.

Jason’s breadth of interest is wide and deep: comics, movies, animated cartoons, music, literature and pulp fiction all feature equally with no sense of rank or hierarchy. This puckish and egalitarian mixing and matching of inspirational sources always and inevitably produces picture-treatises well worth a reader’s time. Over a succession of tales Jason built and constantly re-employed a repertory company of stock characters to explore deceptively simplistic milieux based on classic archetypes of movies, childhood entertainments, historical and literary favourites. These all role-play in deliciously absurd and surreal sagas centred on his preferred themes of relationships and loneliness. In latter years, Jason returned to such “found” players as he built his own highly esoteric universe, and even has a whole bizarre bunch of them “team-up” or clash…

As always, visual/verbal bon mots unfold in beguiling, sparse-dialogued, or even as here silently pantomimic progressions, with compellingly formal page layouts rendered in a pared back stripped-down interpretation of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style: solid blacks, and thick outlines dominating settings of seductive monochrome simplicity augmented by a beguiling palette of stark pastels and muted primary colours.

The majority of his tales brim with bleak isolation, swamped by a signature surreality: largely populated with cinematically-inspired, darkly comic, charmingly macabre animal people ruminating on those inescapable concerns whilst re-enacting bizarrely cast, bestial movie tributes.

This perfect example of his oeuvre is something of a prequel and available as a sturdily comforting hardback or exalted eBook edition: a mild torrent of subtle wonderment that opens with understated crime thriller ‘The Smiling Horse’, wherein the last survivor of a kidnap team endures decades of tense anticipation before their victim’s uncanny avenger finally dispenses long-deferred justice.

Jason then examines his own life, career and romantic failings with harsh, uncompromising detail in ‘A Cat from Heaven’ whilst B-Movie Sci Fi informs ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Virginia Woolf’ as a scientist spends years killing women whilst looking for a body that won’t reject the mean-spirited, constantly carping head he keeps alive in his laboratory, before ‘Tom Waits on the Moon’ inexorably draws together a quartet of introspective, isolated loners into a web of fantastic horror. Still they spend too much time thinking not doing so they get what they deserve…

A cunning period gangster pastiche rendered in subdued shades of red and brown, ‘So Long, Mary Anne’ depicts a decent woman helping a vicious escaped convict flee justice. After they snatch a hostage, the “victim” soon begins to exert an uncanny influence over the desperate killer, but is she just wicked or is there a hidden agenda in play?

Most welcome attraction here is eponymous final story ‘Athos in America’. This is a fabulously engaging “glory days” yarn, acting as a prequel to the author’s spellbinding graphic romp The Last Musketeer. That epic detailed the final exploit of the dashing Athos, who met his end bravely and improbably after 400 years of valiant adventure. But what was he doing in the years before that tragic denouement?

A guy walks into a bar… It’s America in the 1920s and the oddly-dressed Frenchman starts chatting to Bob the barman. As the quiet night unfolds the affable patron relates how he came to America to star in a movie about himself and his three greatest friends. Sadly, after he enjoyed a dalliance with the Studio’s top star, things quickly started to go wrong…

Effortlessly switching back and forth between genre, milieu and narrative pigeonholes, this grab-bag of graphic goodies again proves that Jason is a creative force in comics like no other: one totally deserving as much of your time, attention and disposable income as possible.
All characters, stories and artwork © 2011 Jason. All rights reserved.

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Jack Staff: Everything Used to Be Black and White


By Paul Grist (Dancing Elephant/Image Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-5824-0335-9 (TPB/Digital edition)

Just like many aging Brits & gits, I forget things and yesterday I missed a birthday. September 9th 1960 should be best known as the natal debut of cartoon paragon Paul Grist. Read this – and absolutely the book and its three sequels – to learn why.

Growing up a comic fan in 1960s -1970s Britain was an oddly schizophrenic situation. Not only were we bombarded and enthralled by our own weirdly eclectic mix of TV stars, Dying Empire jingoism and military bluster, fantastic anti-establishment fantasy, science-fiction and sport yarns – all augmented by the sheerly inspired, madcap anarchy of gag strips that always accompanied such adventure serials in our anthology weeklies – but from 1959 on, we also had unfettered access to exotic worlds and thinly veiled cultural imperialism of US comic books, bulk-imported as ballast in cargo ships and readily available in glorious full colour…

And don’t even get me started on the precious few, but always exotic and classy European wonders like Tintin, Lucky Luke and Asterix, simultaneously filtering into the funnybook gestalt constantly brewing in our fevered little heads. All this pictorial wonderment tended to make us young strips disciples a tad epicurean in our tastes and broad-minded, eccentric synthesists about our influences…

I’ve followed Paul Grist’s work since the small press days of Burglar Bill and St. Swithin’s Day, and his brilliantly refined design sense and incisive visual grasp of character made his interpretations of Grendel, Judge Dredd and other commercial properties excellent examples of why individuality always trumps house style. However, when he writes his own material, he steps into a creator class few can touch, always blending and refining key elements of genre and shared public consciousness into a stunningly inviting new nostalgia. For another perfect example check out what he accomplished with hard-boiled detective archetypes in his splendid Kane (see Kane: Welcome to New Eden among others)…

Grist established his own company, Dancing Elephant Press, to produce the kind of works big-time publishers lacked the imagination to support and in 2002 returned to the childhood delights of superhero comics with the creation of Jack Staff, who began life as a proposed Union Jack story for Marvel.

When they pulled the plug, Grist, unable to let a good idea go and now freed of the usual creative restraints that come from playing with other people’s toys, went wild and produced a purely British take on the superhero phenomenon that is simultaneously charming, gripping and devilishly clever. I usually go into laborious (most would say tedious) detail about the events in these graphic novel reviews but this first Jack Staff collection (gathering the first 12 issues) will be an exception as Grist’s captivating style here (based on and mimicking the anthology format of British Weeklies such as Lion and Valiant) means each issue feels like seven stories in one. As my intention is to convince to buy this book I’m sacrificing detail for brevity… you lucky people.

In a nondescript British city Becky Burdock is a feisty girl reporter for trashy newspaper The World’s Press. Opening gambit ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’ finds her hunting down a serial killer scoop on the “Castletown Slasher”, when she accidentally stumbles onto the identity of Jack Staff (Britain’s greatest costumed hero since WWII, and a man missing since the 1980s).

It happens when local builder John Smith saves her from a collapsing billboard, precipitating memories of wartime international superhero team The Freedom Fighters and a battle against a centuries-old vampire. It also strangely involves British Q Branch (investigating un-rational or weird crimes) and US superhuman Sgt. States, Jack Staff’s opposite number and another seemingly immortal patriotic hero.

Marvel Zombies will rightly identify this tale has echoes of the Roy Thomas & Frank Robbins Baron Blood storyline from 1970s title The Invaders, and if Marvel had been more accommodating this would indeed have been a classy sequel to that saga. However they missed their chance and this magically tongue-in-cheek pastiche is the magnificent result and our gain.

There are still superhumans in this world such as heroic Tom Tom, the Robot Man and villainous Doc Tempest, and even mortal champions like Albert Bramble and his son Harold who battle dark forces as vampire hunters, but even they cannot prevent Becky becoming a victim of the killer stalking the city. John Smith is clearly reluctant to rejoin the masked hero community but events keep pushing him until he uncovers an international conspiracy of sanctioned atrocity that naturally gets hushed up by the powers that be…

These stories are rife with references and cameos from 50 years of popular culture, and not just comics. Us Brits love television and thinly disguised TV icons such as Steptoe and Son, Dad’s Army and The Sweeney ferociously jostle alongside purely comic stars such as Captain America and Dr. Strange and members of our own uniquely bizarre periodical pantheon including Robot Archie, Zip Nolan, Kelly’s Eye, Jason Hyde, Adam Eterno and even relatively real people such as Alan Moore and Neal Gaiman.

A far larger part is played by incomparable poacher turned gamekeeper The Spider in second story-arc ‘Secrets, Shadows and the Spider!’ as things go quirkily cosmic after Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter and the increasingly intriguing Q cops stumble into real X Files territory and we get some welcome background into recent history when a 1960s super-criminal starts stealing again.

Or does he? The Spider never shot anybody before…

The mystery is cleared up when elderly Alfred Chinard (it’s a partial anagram – work it out…) hires builder John Smith and springs a trap on his old foe before they notionally team up to stop the real thief. Of course, it doesn’t really go Jack’s way and he’s literally left holding the bag. After a full-length Q adventure ‘Quotations’ involving a meta-fictional serial killer, ‘Out of Time’ rounds out the book (and don’t forget there are three sequels…).

Here, Victorian showman and escapologist Charlie Raven (a canny reworking of period masterpiece Janus Stark) enters the picture, encountering a Dorian Gray-like mystery and losing a battle to a foe who consumes time itself. As a result, charismatic Raven endures an Adam Adamant moment and ends up in 21st century Castletown, where his enemy is still predating the human populace. Also causing trouble is Ben Kulmer – the invisible bandit known as The Claw (and lovingly homaging Ken Bulmer, Tom Tully & Jesús Blasco’s astounding antihero The Steel Claw).

When that nice Mr. Chinard turns up again the stage is set for a spectacular time-rending chronal clash involving the entire expansive cast that is spectacular, boldly bewildering and superbly satisfying.

The stark yet inviting monochrome design, refined, honed and pared down to minimalist approachability has an inescapable feeling of Europe about it. If ever anyone was to create a new TinTin adventure, Grist would be the ideal choice to draw it. Not because he draws like Hergé, but because he knows his craft as well as Hergé did. However, I’m deliriously happy that he has so brilliantly assimilated the essences of cherished keystones of my beloved comics-consuming past and given them such a vital and compelling fresh lease of life.

Thrilling, funny, fabulous. Buy this Book!
™ & © Paul Grist. All rights reserved.

Today in 1952 writer Gerry Conway was born, as was Alison Bechdel in 1960. We’ve done some but hardly all of their many works and we’ll be adding to that list soon.

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Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery


Adapted by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard, edited by David Hine (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-91422-435-5 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.

Published in 1925, and set in the cotton town of Great Harwood, near Blackburn at the Edwardian height of the Lancashire weaving industry, the prose This Slavery explored the ironclad imbalances of the feudal class structure the industry depended upon and did it in terms of a then-fashionable romance novel. It was dismissed in many quarters because of it. Its author Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (January 1st 1886 – December 28th 1962) was a poet, journalist, editor, educator, children’s author and novelist (with at least 10 books released in her lifetime, and whose fashionable gothic romances briefly outsold works by H.G. Wells!) and the first working class woman in Britain to have a book published – Miss Nobody in 1913.

Working class and self-made, she escaped the drudgery of her birth to become a socialist intellectual, foe of fascism, successful author and ardent campaigner. However, she was gradually and in her own lifetime erased from history and public consciousness – perhaps because this daring experiment was intended to reach beyond the intelligentsia on both sides of the cultural battlegrounds. Maybe – just perhaps – it happened because this story recognised that even though all workers were equal, female ones were supposed to be less equal than all the rest, before then challenging that apparently sacrosanct sacred cow and credo…

Divided into two Books, this saga is sparked by the aftermath of a fire at Barstock’s mill. This triggers another cycle of unemployment, privation and deaths for the weakest. Workers are paid a pittance and toil at the owners’ discretion with no salaried protections. Even skilled workers lives depend on the pennies weaving factories dole out whenever the owners need them to, and unemployment is common and frequent. Now, with their only livelihood destroyed with no sign of reopening, many men are leaving for more favourable climes. Of course, their wives and sweethearts must remain…

Hester and Rachel Martin live with their mother and grandmother, one a fierce and ferocious firebrand advocate of political and social change for all and the other a fair-faced, gifted musician in search of peace and security. Life for them is scrounging and performing for pennies or else perpetually borrowing to make do. When their granny dies, they don’t even have the money to bury her…

As their friends and lovers leave, existence becomes ever more onerous, and each achieves a shocking revelation regarding a woman’s place in the grand schemes, Thus each chooses a difficult way to survive…

The manner in which each “gets by” is moodily realised in grittily oppressive episodes beginning with ‘Chapter One: The Proposal’ and inexorably unfolding in a tapestry of tragedy comprising ‘The Denial’, ‘The Exile’, ‘The Struggle’, ‘The Secret’, ‘The Inevitable’, ‘The Undesirables’, ‘The Last Snap’ and ‘The Commitment’ all confirming that the war for freedom and equality is a three way battle: rich vs poor vs women…

As Hester and Rachel each make life-changing decisions, the illustration embraces and resonates with powerful natural forces of nature and darkness opposed to crushing streets, oppressive architecture and shining gleaming inescapable artificial light that emotionally ground down the workers – employed or otherwise. Moreover, as Book Two sees the situation escalate into inevitable mass violence, readers are not allowed to forget that police, “scab” workers, and the military always have paid work to do…
As the drama leads to an inevitable conclusion each sister rediscovers her true nature via ‘Chapter Ten: The Negotiations’, ‘The Strike’, ‘The Lost Opportunity’, ‘The Innocents’, ‘The Beasts of the Jungle’, ‘The Revelations’, ‘The Rebellion’, ‘The Decision’ and momentous moment ‘The Last Battle’…

Like any inspirational tale espousing change, there is the hint of happy endings and brighter futures for all depicted in an ‘Epilogue’ with the entire story reinforced by a candid and thoughtful Afterword from adaptors Sophie & Scarlett Rickard (Mann’s Best Friend, A Blow Borne Quietly, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, No Surrender).

Righteously strident, passionately polemical and powerfully enraging, engaging, this never-more-timely tale of the eternal injustice and biologically apologist is superbly readable, dramatically enticing and should be compulsory viewing for all – as long as we don’t force anyone …

© 2025 SelfMadeHero. Text © 2025 Sophie Rickard. Artwork © 2025 Scarlett Rickard. All rights reserved.
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery will be published on September 11th 2025 and is available for pre-order now.

Today in 1917, cartoonist/writer Frank Robbins was born. Among his many, many masterworks this character stands at the forefront.

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Approximate Continuum Comics


By Lewis Trondheim, edited & translated by Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-410-8 (TPB)

With well over 100 books sporting his name (which isn’t actually Lewis Trondheim but Laurent Chabosy), the writer/artist/editor and educator is one of Europe’s most prolific comics creators: illustrating his own work and working with the industry’s top artists; overseeing animated cartoons of print successes like La Mouche (The Fly) and Kaput and Zösky and even editing younger readers book series Shampooing for Dargaud. His most famous works are the global hits Les Formidables Aventures de Lapinot (translated as The Spiffy Adventures of McConey) and, with Joann Sfar, the Donjon (Dungeon) series of nested fantasy epics (see the translated Dungeon: Parade, Dungeon: Monstres and Dungeon: the Early Years).

Tireless and prolific, he has written for everything from satirical magazine Psikopat to Le Journal de Spirou and Walt Disney. His scripts for the continent’s most popular artists include Le Roi Catastrophe and Vénézia with Fabrice Parme, Les Cosmonautes du futur (Manu Larcenet), Allez Raconte and Papa Raconte (José Parrondo), Politique étrangère (with Jochen Gerner and which Trondheim adapted into an opera in 2009) and Petit Pére Noël (Thierry Robin).

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

I first became aware of Lewis Trondheim’s subtly engaging comics mannerism in Fantagraphics’ Mome anthologies which reprinted excerpts of his utterly entrancing comics blog Little Nothings, wherein Trondheim’s friends and acquaintances, rendered and simultaneously masked as anthropomorphised animals (with him a dowdy, parrot-beaked central figure) revisit episodes of his life, flavoured with philosophy, personal introspection, whimsical inquiry and foible-filled observations.

These mini-treats were gathered into four terrific tomes of drawn diaries for constant re-reading (Little Nothings: Curse of the Umbrella, The Prisoner Syndrome, Uneasy Happiness and My Shadow in the Distance). You might still find the first three available as collected gift set Bigger Nothings…

However, before all that, in 1993 Trondheim first explored the idea as a 4-issue American-styled comic book project and those prototypical slices of wry and winning reportage are finally available in a translated black and white softcover collection. Some of the very first autobiographical works on the French bande dessinée scene, these little gems were a genuine game-changer for cartoonists and storytellers, prompting a rise in personal stories that has generated many works to rival the best of Harvey Pekar himself and created a new (sub)genre of graphic narrative…

In this collected Approximate Continuum Comics the signature blend of visualised introspection and self-condemnatory flagellation finds the younger Trondheim questioning his own professional integrity; violently and graphically wish-fulfilling his way through rush-hour crowds (haven’t we all?); planning – for which read risk-assessing – his forthcoming marriage and dealing with his unfathomable Japanese publisher during the early days of creating his multi-media hit La Mouche.

He regularly gets lost in his own free-associating daydreams and rightly fears being castigated by his own conscience for swimming in megalomania, indecisiveness, forthrightness and deference. Trondheim’s many inner voices don’t like him very much: there are myriad incidences of self-abuse where his alternate egos beat the crap out of him; counterbalanced with gloriously loaded “real-world” episodes where he lampoons and embarrasses his fellow studio-mates of publishing collective L’Association. (To be fair these are fabulously balanced by a marvellous section at the book’s end where such maligned and injured creative colleagues as David B., Emile Bravo, Didier Tronchet, Jean-Christophe Menu, Killofer & Philippe Dupuy among others, as well as civilian friends, his wife Brigitte and even his mother all get a trenchant and routinely hilarious right-to-reply.)

The first inklings of the artist’s perennial problems with technology in general and computer games in particular appear here, as do many childhood memoirs and sundry diatribes against people and places either experienced or sometimes only imagined. One of the best sequences concerns the trip-of-a-lifetime to America (first of many, but he didn’t know that then…) and his apparent inability to think of one single strip idea about it, only surpassed by his behaviour at a raucous party held in his beloved studio.

During the course of these cartoon capers, Trondheim married his fiancée, sired his first child and moved into a new home, but although these major events are thoroughly and compellingly covered they still pale into insignificance against the spectacular battles against his inevitably spreading paunch, obsessively mean-spirited self-criticism and the thunderbolt-like occasional phone call from his mum. …And whenever that’s no longer painful enough there’s always the violent physical assaults and punishment-beatings from his inner selves…

Personal favourites of mine include Les petits riens, Tiny Tyrant, Ralph Azham, Mr. O, Archives of Lost Issues, Mister I, Infinity 8 and A.L.I.E.E.E.N. but if you fancy other kinds of fare, Trondheim’s probably covered whatever you fancy and done it with wit and aplomb…

Superbly skilled at switching imperceptibly from broad self-parody to cripplingly honest and  painful personal revelation; wild surrealism to powerful reportage and from clever humorous observation to howling existentialist inquisition, Trondheim’s cartoon interior catalogue is always a supremely rewarding and enjoyable experience and, as these ancient texts prove, always has been…
© 2001 Lewis Trondheim and Cornélius. This edition © 2011 Fantagraphics Books. All Rights Reserved.