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Brahma Dreaming


By John Jackson, illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzina (JJBooks)
ISBN: 978-0-9569212-8-4

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Lavish, luxurious and utterly special – a book the entire family will adore … 10/10

I love books. I always have. I also had tremendously understanding parents.

When I was kid each birthday and every Christmas brought fantastic volumes that assaulted all the senses my podgy young body was prey to. The 1960s were a golden age for fabulous books for kids or adults…

The feel of shiny, sturdy card-covers and solidly reliable paper pages, the reassuring weight of a tome, the smell of printers ink and faint crack of a thick, solid spine opening for the very first time always overwhelmed me with each fresh acquisition. (I quickly got over licking my books – it made the pages soggy and smoosh together…)

Most important of course were the contents: words and pictures which could transport a reader to worlds ancient, modern or even futuristic, comfortably familiar and fantastically alien.

Like most of my compatriots I consumed everything, but I always harboured a particular affinity for stories about mythical Heroes, Gods and Monsters…

Now decades later, after a seeming eternity of books getting gradually smaller, duller, flimsier – but certainly not cheaper – the good old days seem to be returning. It’s obviously the time and season for books that look and feel like something special…

Case in point is this magnificent construction – a colossal 304 x 216mm, 248 page monochrome prose-&-illustration hardback from advocate, barrister, businessman, campaigner and writer-turned-publisher John Jackson.

Between nostalgically welcoming substantial card covers rests a captivatingly retelling of tales from the Hindu Holy Trinity the Trimurti, augmented and embellished with 50 spectacular full and double-page ink illustrations by Italian artist Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzina (A Little Piece of England, Animals Marco Polo Saw, Tales for Great Grandchildren: Folk Tales from India and Nepal and others).

Her stark, lush style is reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley, Sidney Sime, Edmund Dulac and other past masters of elegant fantasy and will instantly transport you to places long away and far ago…

The captivating recapitulations begin in Tales of Creation: dealing with the earliest days of the universe when the grand cosmic sound Aum echoed in the void and brought forth the Lords of Creation Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer.

In ‘The Beginning’, we learn how, after dreaming, Brahma brought forth Seven Wise Men and their wives. From these came the races of Gods and Demons. After this Brahma dreamed again and the First World was created, populated with animals and mankind.

When Wise Man Durvasas brought his haughty nephew Indra, King of the Gods a gift it was unappreciated and resulted in ‘The Curse’ which tipped the balance in the eternal war between Gods and Demons. The deities beseeched Brahma to intercede, and the Lord of Creation delegated the task to Vishnu who revealed all could be made well if the Gods found a way to churn ‘The Milk Ocean’…

‘The Lie’ tells of Kadru, the Mother of all Snakes and her sister Vinata, revealing the dangers of excessive pride and arrogance, whilst in ‘The Sons of King Sagara’ a king with no heirs consults the Wise Man Bhrigu with spectacular results.

Indeed Sagara and his wives Kerini and Somati then begat so many sons that, as an army, they could conquer the Earth and challenge Indra himself…

As everyone knows, the First World ended in a mighty flood with only the healer Manu warned in time to preserve the Seven Wise Men and all the seeds of life and knowledge in a great boat. To ensure the Second World after the deluge Brahma became ‘The Fish’ which guided them all to safety on Mount Himavan…

Tales of Destruction deals with the harsh existence of Shiva the Destroyer, beginning with the lonely, unlovable bachelor’s search for a wife in ‘Sati’. That brief happy union was destroyed by the callous pranks of Wise Man Narada whose meddling tongue led to the bride’s death of ‘Burning Love’ – and the fiery vengeance of Shiva…

It also resulted in more celestial war, but the overwhelming campaign of the demon warlord ‘Taraka’ produced in turn a rebirth of the Destroyer’s wife in the young goddess ‘Uma’…

The Destroyer was, however, unable to create a child even though it was prophesied that such a paradoxical progeny was the only being who could win the Demon War and kill Taraka. It took the inspired intercession of Fire God Agni to finally quicken the saviour child who would be ‘Kartikeya’ God of War…

The fallout of this impossible conception was fury on behalf of Shiva’s second wife. The betrayed goddess showed hidden strength by losing her temper and, in a special dance, revealing her terrifying submerged aspect as Kalee, Destroyer of Time before finding proper stability in ‘How Uma Became Parvati’…

The grisly origins and acts of ‘Ganesha’ the Elephant-headed god then lead us into an astounding story of passion and devotion in ‘Yama and the Love Girl’. Then the convoluted tale of how prankster sky-maiden Anjana was turned into a monkey before she and Wind God Vayu conceived the mighty ‘Hanuman’ takes us full circle when easily-slighted Ganesha takes vengeance on the cruelly teasing Moon God in ‘Chandra’s Shame’…

This staggering and enthralling compendium concludes with some exploits of Vishnu in Tales of Preservation, beginning with the story of his manifested earthly aspect Krishna – ‘The Blue Boy’…

The boy’s aunt was blessed – or cursed – with a complex divinely-orchestrated fate and ‘The Loves of Queen Pritha’ details how the poor woman bore five children by different gods and became the root cause of a tragic and appalling war between families.

The epic search that reunited ‘Rama and Sita’ also includes the last great exploit of Hanuman, after which ‘The City of Dwaraka’ reveals how Krishna grew into a mighty hero and demon killer, although even he struggled to quell the all-encompassing strife between Pritha’s warring offspring the Kauravas and Pandavas…

Retired in Dwaraka, Krishna had many children. When one of them, Samba, annoyed a Yogi with his mischief the wayward boy was repaid in brutal kind by “giving birth” to ‘The Iron Rod’ which ended his father’s life…

The fable of ‘Little Gopala’ ends our mythological voyage, relating how a small and very ordinary boy became blessed of a ghostly brother with skin the colour of the sky, and the wheel turns full circle with The End describing how works of The Lords of Creation are with us still…

Epic, engaging and astonishingly enthralling, this is the kind of book entire families read; and yours should be one of them…
© 2013 John Jackson. All rights reserved.

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The Strange Tale of Panorama Island


By Edogawa Rompo, adapted and illustrated by Suehiro Maruo, translated by Ryan Sands & Kyoko Nitta (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-777-8

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Beautiful, seductive and intoxicating… 10/10

Edogawa Rompo is hailed as the Godfather of Japanese detective fiction – his output as author and critic defining the crime thriller from 1923 to his death in 1965. Born Tarō Hirai, he worked under a nom-de-plume based on his own great inspiration, Edgar Allen Poe, penning such well-loved classics as The Two-Sen Copper Coin, The Stalker in the Attic, The Black Lizard and The Monster with 20 Faces as well as many tales of his signature hero detective Kogoro Akechi, notional leader of the stalwart young band Shōnen tantei dan (the Boy Detective’s Gang).

He did much to popularise the concept of the rationalist observer and deductive mystery-solver. In 1946 he sponsored the detective magazine Hōseki (Jewels) and a year later founded the Detective Author’s Club, which survives today as the Mystery Writers of Japan association.

Although his latter years were taken up with promoting the genre, producing criticism, translation of western fiction and penning crime books for younger audiences, much of his earlier output (Rampo wrote twenty novels and lots of short stories) were dark, sinister concoctions based on the trappings and themes of ero guro nansensu (“eroticism, grotesquerie, and the nonsensical”) playing into the then-contemporary Japanese concept of hentai seiyoku or “abnormal sexuality”.

From that time comes this particular adaptation, originally serialised in Enterbrain’s monthly magazine Comic Beam from July 2007-January 2008.

Panorama-tō Kidan or The Strange Tale of Paradise Island was a vignette released in 1926, adapted here with astounding flair and finesses by uncompromising illustrator and adult manga master Suehiro Maruo.

A frequent contributor to the infamous Japanese underground magazine Garo, Maruo is the crafter of such memorable and influential sagas as Ribon no Kishi (Knight of the Ribbon), Rose Coloured Monster, Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, The Laughing Vampire, Ultra-Gash Inferno, How to Rake Leaves and many others.

This is a lovely book. A perfect physical artefact of the themes involved, this weighty oversized (262x187mm) monochrome hardback has glossy full-colour inserts, creator biographies and just feels like something extra special, whilst it compellingly chronicles an intriguingly baroque tale of greed, lust, deception and duplicity which begins when starving would-be author Hitomi Hirosuke reads of the death of the Taisho Emperor.

The shock of losing the revered ruler (December 26th 1926) echoed through the entire nation and forces the failing writer to brutally reassess his life.

He finds himself wanting…

At another fruitless meeting with his editor Ugestu, Hitomi learns that an old friend, Genzaburo Komoda, has passed away. At college the boys were implausibly inseparable: the poor but ambitious kid and the heir to one of the greatest industrial fortunes in Japan. Perhaps it was because they looked and sounded exactly alike: doppelgangers nobody could tell apart…

The presumed cause of death was the asthma which had plagued the wealthy scion all his life and Hitomi, fuelled by self-loathing and inspired by Poe’s tale “The Premature Burial”, hatches a crazy scheme…

Faking his own suicide the writer leaves his effects to Ugestu before travelling to Kishu and immediately beginning his insane plot. Starving himself the entire time, Hitomi locates his pal’s grave, disposes of the already mouldering body and dons the garments and jewellery of Komoda. He even smashes out a front tooth and replaces it with the false one from the corpse…

His ghastly tasks accomplished, the starving charlatan simply collapses in a road where he can be found…

The news spreads like wildfire and soon all Komoda’s closest business associates have visited the miraculous survivor of catalepsy. The intimate knowledge Hitomi possesses combined with the “shock and confusion” of his miraculous escape is enough to fool even aged family retainer Tsunoda, and the fates are with him in that the widow Chiyoko has gone to Osaka to get over her loss. Of course she will rush back as soon as she hears the news…

However with gifts and good wishes flooding in, even Chiyoko is seemingly fooled and the fraudster begins to settle in his new skin. Just to be safe, however, he keeps the wife at a respectful and platonic distance. Comfortably entrenched, he begins to move around the Komoda fortune.

Hitomi the starving writer’s great unfinished work was The Tale of RA, a speculative fantasy in which a young man inherits a vast fortune and uses it to create an incredible, futuristic pleasure place of licentious delight. Now the impostor starts to make that sybaritic dream a reality, repurposing the family wealth into buying an island, relocating its inhabitants and building something never before conceived by mind of man…

Fobbing off all questions with the lie that he is constructing an amusement park that will be his eternal legacy, he populates the marvel of Arcadian engineering, landscaping, and optical science with a circus of wanton performers, living statues of erotic excess and a manufactured mythological bestiary.

He even claims that the colossal expenditure will kick-start the local economic malaise, but for every obstacle overcome another seems to occur. Moreover he cannot shift the uneasy feeling that Chiyoko suspects the truth about him…

Eventually however the great dream of plutocratic grandeur, lotus-eating luxury and hedonistic sexual excess is all but finished and “Komoda” escorts his wife on a grand tour of the wondrous celebration of debauched perversity that is his personal empire of the senses.

Once ensconced there he ends his worries of Chiyoka exposing him, but all too soon his PanoramaIsland receives an unwanted visitor.

Kogoro Akechi has come at the behest of the wife’s family and he has a few questions about, of all things, a book.

It seems that an editor, bereaved by the loss of one of his protégés, posthumously published that tragic young man’s magnum opus to celebrate his wasted life: a story entitled The Tale of RA…

This dark compelling morality play is realised in a truly breathtaking display of artistic virtuosity by Maruo, who combines clinical detail of intoxicating decadence with vast graphic vistas in a torrent of utterly enchanting images, whilst never allowing the visuals to overwhelm the underlying narrative and rise and fall of a boldly wicked protagonist…

Stark, stunning, classically clever and utterly adult The Strange Tale of Paradise Island is one of the best-looking, most absorbing crime thrillers I’ve seen this century, and no mystery loving connoisseur of comics, cinema or prose should miss it.

© 2008, 2013 HIRAI Rutaro, MARUO Suehiro. All rights reserved. English translation © 2013 Last Gasp.
This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

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Tropic of the Sea


By Satoshi Kon, translated by Maya Rosewood (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-939130-06-8

In the West we’re used to single manga stories filling entire bookcases: epic sagas filling thousands of pages with brilliant, lovely, exciting but generally very long tales on every theme and subject under the sun.

Every so often, however, something comes along which is more familiar to English sensibilities, such as this short, sharp, sinister shocker from screenwriter, artist, animator and Director Satoshi Kon.

The author was born in Kushiro Subprefecture, Hokkaido in 1963 and after High School attended MusashinoArtUniversity’s Graphic Design department from 1982-1987. Whilst there he spent a lot of time studying foreign film.

Whilst still a student he released the short manga Toriko and became an assistant to Katsuhiro Otomo, dividing his time between comics and animation. In 1990 he produced the single volume Kaikisen we’re concentrating on here, before graduating more fully toward film as scripter, layout artist and animator.

Amongst his credits are World Apartment Horror, Roujin Z, Patlabor 2: The Movie, Magnetic Rose, Perfect Blue Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and others. What would have certainly been a stellar career in either or both art forms was cruelly cut short in 2010 when he died tragically young from pancreatic cancer.

As Shinsouban Kaikisen, this eerie yarn was first serialised in Kodansha’s Young Magazine in 1990: eleven episodes between issues #17 and 29, thereafter collected in tankōbon form and again as a Bijutsu Shuppan edition in 1999. That commemorative tome provides the informative Afterword which ends this book describing the author’s path from mangaka to animator.

Tropic of the Sea opens on a secluded beach where teenager Yosuke and his dog Fujimaru play before the dutiful son climbs to a hilltop shrine to enact a centuries-old ritual. His joyful morning is then disturbed when his father brings a TV crew into the sacred area.

Yozo Yashiro is the 23rd Head Priest of the Hiratsu Shrine; a thoroughly modern man keenly supporting a major consortium’s ambitious plans to turn the sleepy fishing village of Ade into a modern luxury resort. As such he’s keen on publicity and is happy to disturb the Mermaid’s Egg within the shrine and show it to all the viewers whilst explaining the silly but charming legend attached to it.

Long ago his ancestor found another such egg and promised a mermaid to respectfully care for it. After six decades the egg was returned to the sea and another egg left. In return the sea matron guaranteed calm waters and abundant fishing. This current egg was deposited in the shrine almost exactly sixty years ago…

The televised lecture is interrupted by Yosuke’s furious grandfather who has dragged himself out of hospital to stop the travesty he has just seen. Again the bitter argument begins. Grandfather is a fierce opponent of the proposed resort, whereas the current priest is no believer in his duties, nor the sacrosanct pact between the fishermen and the nonsensical sea-woman.

He does however realise the tourist potential of a Mermaid’s Egg theme park…

The village too is divided into warring camps on the issue. The fishermen see their ancestral livelihoods threatened by the proposed tourist trap whilst shopkeepers imagine thousands of new customers flocking in daily.

As Yosuke and best buddy Tetsu discuss the potential influx of college girls and summer days, they watch a limousine full of Ozaki Construction bigwigs arrive to inspect the monstrous Hotel growing like a giant tumour on the beach, and feel a pang of apprehension…

The egg is now common knowledge and billboards proclaiming “Welcome to Mermaid Country” are everywhere, but the boys’ minds are on more mundane things… but only until they take a dinghy out to the sacrosanct offshore islet Kamijima and catch a tantalising glimpse of something impossible in the water…

It turns out to be only old school friend Nami, back from Tokyo for the summer mermaid festival and taking a playful swim, but Yosuke is still uneasy and oddly unsettled…

With Ade becoming a bustling, money-mad boomtown and the priestly Yozo vigorously pushing villagers into selling their land to the developers, grandfather – despite his illness – is determined to honour the family’s ancient promise, and things take a decidedly dark turn when ambitious corporate development head Kenji Ozaki starts taking an unhealthy interest in the Egg. He also lets slip that Kamijimi will be razed and turned into Marine Land theme park…

He’s too late: by the time his team get to the hilltop shrine the Mermaid’s treasure has vanished. The trail leads to Kamijima where Nami and the boys find grandpa with the Egg in a submerged grotto. It’s the place where the mermaid has come every sixty years to pick up her hatchling and leave a new egg and grandpa has almost killed himself getting it here. Hard on the kids’ heels, however, come Ozaki and his goons.

As the businessman tries to appropriate the gleaming globe a strange waterspout erupts and in the tumult Yosuke badly cuts his hand. The drama soon subsides though, and as they all return to Ade in Ozaki’s launch, the boy is amazed to realise that when he picked up the Egg his wound completely healed…

There’s even stranger news to come as tensions over the Corporation’s full building schemes leak out. In the hospital the doctors cannot understand how grandpa’s terminal stomach cancer has completely gone…

Days pass and already the first wave of tourists are despoiling the previously quiet seaside atmosphere. Nami and Yosuke – no longer sceptical about the Egg – are making plans, but Ozaki is also convinced that the object has some mysterious power and takes steps to claim it for the company even as his bulldozers begin to clear Kamijima.

The fishermen are furious. Their once-abundant catches have dried up and the Mermaid’s Egg festival, crowded with suits and tourist interlopers, degenerates into a massive riot. In the melee, with Yozo’s compliance, Ozaki takes the artefact into his safekeeping, and the stunned, betrayed Yosuke thinks he sees a figure on a rock, waiting in vain for her child to be returned…

As Ozaki’s technicians poke and probe the Egg, the traditional day of surrender comes and goes. Yosuke barely survives an uncanny contact with something beyond the scope of science and, with Nami and Tetsu, determines to retrieve the Egg and return it to its true owner whatever the risk…

A tense clash on a bridge finds the kids surprisingly victorious but it’s too late. The Egg hatches in Yosuke’s hands and at the beach the sea vanishes. It can mean only one thing. A tsunami is coming: a wall of angry wild water to wipe away all the foul fabrications of double-dealing, oath-breaking mankind…

Brooding and pensive, this superb supernatural thriller builds tension with masterful dexterity in beguilingly understated style and Kon’s superb draughtsmanship and meticulous pacing keeps the suspense simmering until the spectacular denouement snatches your breath away. A cracking tale no fiction fan or comics collector should miss – especially as the book also includes a gallery of the beautiful title pages which accompanied the original Young Magazine serialisation.

Tropic of the Sea is a minor masterpiece of modern fantasy fiction and a perfect spooky epic movie in waiting…

© 2013 KON’STONE Inc. All rights reserved.
This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

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Rogue Touch


By Christine Woodward (Hyperion)
ISBN: 978-1-4013-1102-5

It seems that the signature genre of comics – the superhero – has at last gained some degree of literary legitimacy. Even if you ignore the collected pulp exploits of Doc Savage or The Shadow, or the assorted novelisations and prose forays from funnybook publishers capitalising on the early success of series like Wild Cards with their own key brands, the timbre of modern times has allowed costumed do-gooders and crazed masterminds to finally break into “real” publishing.

Now even proper book companies have many titles that blend crime, horror, science fiction and the peculiarly comicbook cult of the Over-Man into their mainstream fare.

With that in mind here’s something a little different and probably more in tune with the tastes of female readers, Young Adults and those fans possessing only a passing familiarity with X-Men continuity.

LET ME BE SPECIFIC. THIS IS A NOVEL. THERE ARE NO PICTURES INSIDE.

In the Marvel Universe Rogue was first seen as a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants: a disturbed young girl cursed with a power that stole abilities and memories from anybody who touched her skin-to-skin.

It was an ability she could not control or turn off, and any overlong fleshy contact resulted in the victim falling into a coma with their entire history and essence drained into her. Rogue then became a reluctant jailer with stolen powers and personalities locked in her head forever.

Played as a “bad-girl” and mystery woman for years, Rogue grew to become one of the most popular characters in the excessively large X-cast, winning her own miniseries where it was first revealed that as a young girl her powers manifested just as she was kissing her first love Cody Robbins…

With the boy she wanted imprisoned in her head whilst his body permanently shut down, the girl knew she was a freak and monster who must never again experience human contact…

This novel picks up a little later and never mentions any aspect of the Marvel Universe as it begins the story of 20-year old Anna Marie: a reluctant recluse working a dead-end night job at a small bakery in Jackson, Mississippi.

Always wrapped head-to-toe in many layers, the odd night owl one night sees a weird lurking man almost waiting for her. She takes steps to avoid him, the way she avoids everybody who might accidentally touch her and suffer the horrific consequences…

However the non-incident rattles her and gives boss Wendy Lee an excuse to fire her…

All but unemployable and strapped for cash, Anna Marie is forced to apply for food stamps, but waiting in line she sees the same creepy, good-looking guy. However when she challenges him she inadvertently calls attention to the fact that he’s pulling some kind of scam and security guards chase him from the building.

She sees her stalker again on the streets and realises that even in the Mississippi heat the guy is cold and really, really hungry. Without really knowing why, she gives him some of her food stamps…

Over the next few days they keep meeting and become friendlier, but James is a strange and cagy man with an accent she can’t place and the weirdest gaps in his knowledge of everyday life.

Her prospects don’t improve and one night, reduced to desperation, Anna Marie breaks into the bakery, intent on taking food to the value of the severance check she didn’t get. Tragically, Wendy Lee discovers her and in the scuffle makes contact…

Now with a young boy and an old lady stuck in her head, the horrified, guilt-ridden girl realises she has to steal a car and get out of town as soon as possible …and that’s when James drives up, offering her a ride to anywhere she wants…

Thus begins an epic and immensely engaging rollercoaster ride across America as the mismatched loners discover each other and the incredible secrets both are concealing. He prefers to be called “Touch” rather than James and has impossible gifts too. As she slowly allows herself to love the boy, “Rogue” – as he insists on calling her – is forced to accept just how much of a stranger he is… especially once the super-scientific pursuers and monster animals chasing him start to close in on her too.

He also knows far more about her than he at first let on…

Draped in the eternal allure of two kids in love and on the run, and designed to attract readers raised on Roswell High, Sookie Stackhouse, Twilight and generations of road-buddy movies, in Rogue Touch Christine Woodward successfully translates the X-Men’s memory-&-power-leeching Southern Belle into a compelling, alienated but ultimately powerful, self-reliant and triumphant woman in an increasingly fantastic and dangerous world.

Immensely readable and engaging, this is a supremely cunning and clever confection: easily affixable to Marvel’s mutant mythology should you be so inclined, but also a completely self-contained science fiction/young romance thriller that will delight the aficionados of all those so-successful alienated teen prose franchises. There’s even room and scope for a sequel or two…

™ & © 2013 Marvel and Subs. All Rights Reserved.

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Sickness Unto Death volume 1


By Hikaru Asada & Takahiro Seguchi (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-939130-09-9

Continuing their line of challenging manga for adult readers, Vertical have begun here a two-volume translation of Takahiro Seguchi’s gripping psychological melodrama Sickness Unto Death: a bleak and enthralling, emotionally complex tale of love, compulsion and dependency turned into spellbinding comics by artist Hikaru Asada.

Inspired by Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s treatise The Sickness Unto Death, this extremely accessible tale first appeared in Japan as Shi ni Itaru Yamai, serialised in Hakusensha’s fortnightly Seinen magazine Young Animal in 2009, and opens with a Professor standing beside a student over the grave of his first case – and greatest love…

When, as a young man, Kazuma Futaba came to the city to study clinical psychology, he was lucky to find lodgings in an old house. However on his way there he encountered a young girl with white hair suffering a crushing anxiety attack in the street. Although everybody ignored the crippled creature he went to her assistance and happily complied with her desperate need to be held.

‘Emiru’ was impossibly cold to the touch and although both were merely 18 years old she seemed inexorably gripped by an ancient despondency, and overwhelming gloom…

When she recovered he hurried on to find his new digs in a vast old house and met the butler Kuramoto who revealed that the place belonged to the orphan Emiru Ariga, a beautiful vivacious creature who had within the last two years suddenly succumbed to a crushing ‘Despair’ so great it had bleached her hair, caused drastic weight-loss, weakened her heart and caused her body temperature to fall to far below normal. He described it as a “terminal illness of the spirit”…

She spent most of her time locked in her room, drawing monsters and waiting to die…

Intrigued, desperate to help but painfully aware of how inexperienced he was, Futaba examined the compliant, barely-living corpse and determined to somehow help her. At least she showed some animation when he was near. Both Kuramoto and his young mistress wanted Futaba to fix her…

In ‘Haunted Mansion’ the relationship developed further as the student transferred what he learnt by day at school into evening practise. Emiru seemed brighter, even though she believed the house concealed ghosts…

When Kuramoto was called away for a few days, he left Futaba in charge, but after the frail girl spent too long in a bath the boy had panicked and broke in, seeing her painfully thin, nude form for the first time. Embarrassed and confused he dashed out and discovered a mystery room, door nailed shut with heavy planks.

Emiru saw ghosts: a crying, lonely child and a monster with teeth but no face…

Her sleep was perpetually disturbed, and Futaba – after learning about Night Terrors in class – agreed to ‘Sharing a Bed’, even though he was no longer certain his own motives were strictly professional. Nevertheless, resolved to save her he began with a ‘Psych Assessment’, gathering facts and personal history, but learned little more than once she was normal and then suddenly she wasn’t…

Emiru spent increasing time locked in despair, weeping outside the barred room; her traumatic nights eased by Kazuma’s platonic presence, although she felt the spectral presence of ‘The One in the Mansion’ whenever he was away…

In the present, Professor Futaba and student Minami – who thinks she too can see a ghost in the abandoned dwelling – explore the deserted, decrepit mansion which housed his greatest regret. When they stop at a monster drawing scrawled on a wall, it takes him back to those troubled years…

A setback in Emiru’s recovery occurred when another ghost sighting triggered a wave of depression and young Futaba learned of her carefree ‘High School Years’ from fellow psych student Koizumi – a classmate of Emiru when she a healthy, happy, raven-haired ball of wild energy, fun and adventure…

Koizumi believed she became burdened with some terrible secret which overnight transformed her into the frail fading creature Futaba describes, prompting the floundering lad to confer with his tutor Professor Otsuki who lent him a copy of Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death…

For such a weakened patient even a cold could be fatal, but with Futaba at her side Emiru pulled through. However after recovering she had enticed him into crossing a ‘Forbidden Line’ but neither as therapist nor lover was young Futaba assured of securing her ‘Happiness and Beauty’ until and unless he could her unburden her obsessive soul of the dark secret strangling it from within…

To Be Concluded…

Beguiling and hypnotic, this exceptional medical mystery/ghostly love story is far from the familiar – to Western eyes at least – explosive bombast and action slapstick normally associated with manga. As such it might just make a few converts amongst die-hard holdouts who prefer sensitive writing, deep themes and human scale to their comics.

Moody, moving and far more than just another adult comic, Sickness Unto Death is that rare thing: a graphic novel for people who don’t think they like comics…

© 2010 Hikaru Asada. © 2010 Takahiro Seguchi. All rights reserved.
This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

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The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora – Album Covers and Music Illustrations


By Irwin Chusid & Barbara Economon (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-655-3

Some artists can be said to epitomise an era, their works forever evoking the time and style and flavour of a discreet age. Usually it’s all those inspired invisible creatives toiling at the coalface of imagination: advertising and package designers, film poster artists, fashion designers and yes, comic and strip illustrators, whose individual yet socially synergistic efforts pool and leak into a generation’s psyche.

A very select few artists can be also be charged with actually creating the definition of an epoch: Jim Flora was one of those…

Born in Ohio in 1914, he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1935-1939. A year before he graduated Flora met brilliant but troubled author and artist Robert Lowry and together they founded the influential Little Man Press, publishing a stellar line of impressive literary titles with eye-catching art and design.

In 1942 they parted and Flora, newly married, briefly became a freelance artist before taking a job with Columbia Records. He upped sticks for Westport Connecticut, initially working for the in-house art department under Alex Steinweiss (inventor of the illustrated album cover).

The newcomer designed ads, crafted and illustrated new-release pamphlets and assorted retail trade literature, but when his boss enlisted in the Navy, the 4-F Flora was promoted to Art Director.

Always drawing and designing, he continued until 1945, creating the groundbreaking advance-trade periodical Coda, and was promoted to Advertising Manager. However, afflicted with an insatiable hunger to create, Flora chafed in such a time-consuming, bureaucratic position, even as his first landmark LP designs began to appear throughout 1947.

Despite having a wife and five kids to support, in 1950 he resigned and relocated with the brood to Mexico for 15 months. Despite revelling in artistic freedom and absorbing the colourful kinetic art of the region, the Floras returned to Connecticut in 1951, and Jim began a hugely successful career as a freelance illustrator. Thereafter he lent his uniquely enchanting style to record covers for Columbia, RCA Victor, Camden and others whilst generating mountains of illustrations for books, newspapers and magazines.

Life, Look, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Holiday, Mademoiselle, Research and Engineering, Computer Design Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Collier’s and many others numbered him amongst their regular contributors, and for most of 1952 he also operated as Art Director for Park East, where he published the earliest commercial art of R.O. Blechman and Andy Warhol.

His tireless creativity and graphic invention always forcing him into new challenges, Flora also created storyboards for animator Gene Deitch at cartoon factory United Productions of America (UPA).

He was also a savvy professional and could see how times and trends would inevitably shift. With fashion inexorably against him, Rock ‘n’ Roll supplanting Jazz and classical sounds and photography encroaching on album sleeves, in 1955 he sold his first illustrated children’s book The Fabulous Fireworks Family to Harcourt Brace, and produced sixteen more until retirement in 1982.

He loved everything nautical or maritime and cherished Jazz, and his pervasive, infectious style transformed animation and graphic illustration from the late1950s on, when all those kids who’d bought his LP covers or read his publicity bulletins began to work on cartoons for the burgeoning, all-consuming television industry or entered the advertising field.

Flora was addicted to making art and employed a uniquely frenetic, narrative-packed rhythmic style that jumped with boundless energy and charm and paid no-nevermind to foolish hobgoblins like perspective, representational anatomy or good taste and common sense. Many of the most impressive works abound with wry but subtly concealed scenes of horror, sex and violence…

Flora never drew comics, but if he had they would have been amazing…

This superb coffee-table art book by biographers, archivists and fans Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon is the fourth compilation in a series that includes The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (2004), The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (2007) and The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora (2009). As such it contains hundreds of beguiling and revelatory images, roughs, sketches, photos, designs, layouts, complete ads and spot illustrations from his most productive decades: images impossibly familiar and nostalgia-loaded for anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.

Most importantly this book also reproduces every (known) record cover Flora created…

It all opens with Chusid’s expansive biographical overview ‘Wizard of the Square-Foot Canvas’ and includes an ‘Interview with Jim Flora’ plus Martina Schmitz’ ‘Interview with Robert Jones’ (lifelong buddy and Flora’s Art Director successor at Columbia, RCA Victor and Park East, he commissioned a vast number of works from the freelancer), all liberally bedecked with stunning pictures.

The colossal Album Covers gallery then commences to steal your visual breath away presenting stunning reproductions of those eccentric masterpieces from Mambo For Cats to The Dukes of Dixieland, Strollin’ the Cha Cha Cha to Inside Sauter-Finegan, from Lord Buckley’s Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies Knock Me Your Lobes to Mexican Folk Songs or Till Eulenspiegel to For Boppers Only, concluding with a groovy selection of his commercial art spreads and later fine art pieces – paintings, drawings and prints celebrating music, friends and life.

His influence on generations of artists is incalculable and lasting. Flora passed away in 1998, but his pictures are still here, frantically jinking and jiving in every mind that ever saw them…

The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora © 2013 Irwin Chusid. All images © the Heirs of Jim Flora, except where noted otherwise. All rights reserved.
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: a pictorial time-warp for hepcats of all ages… 8/10

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Science – A Discovery in Comics


By Margreet de Heer with Yiri T. Kohl (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-750-8

There’s no use denying it: Annual Gift-Giving Season isn’t far off and it’s never too early to think of the ideal item for that troublesome family/friend unit. So here’s something scientifically approved and tested to fit the bill for any disputative colleague fed up with socks, pants, pen-sets or One Direction action figures…

It has long been a truism of the creative arts that the most effective, efficient and economical method of instruction and informational training has been the comic strip.

Advertising mavens have always exploited the subversive impact of well-chosen words wedded to evocative pictures, and public information materials frequently use sequential narrative to get hard messages over quickly and simply.

Additionally, since World War II, carefully crafted strips have been constantly used as training materials in every aspect of adult life from school careers advice to various branches of military service – utilising the talents of comics giants as varied as Milton Caniff, Will Eisner (who spent decades producing reams of comic manuals for the US army and other government departments), Kurt Schaffenberger and Neil Adams.

These days the educational value and merit of comics is a given.

Larry Gonick in particular has been using the strip medium to stuff learning and entertainment in equal amounts into the weary brains of jaded students with such tomes as The Cartoon History of the Universe, The Cartoon History of the United States and The Cartoon Guide to… series (Computers, Non-Communication, Physics, Statistics, the Environment, Genetics, Sex and more).

Japan employs vast quantities of manga text books in its schools and universities and has even released government reports and business prospectuses as comic books to get around the ingrained apathy towards reading large dreary volumes of public information.

So do we, and so do the Americans.

Here Margreet de Heer and husband Yuri again employ the medium to sublimely and elegantly tackle another all-consuming preoccupation and noble creation of the mind of Man, following their previous endeavours elucidatory endeavours…

She was born in 1972 into a family of theologians and, despite some rebellious teen forays to the wild side of life, studied Theology for 9 years at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating in 1999 she decided to become a cartoonist – and did – but also worked at the wonderful comics and cool stuff emporium/cultural icon Lambiek in Amsterdam.

Whilst there she collaborated with industry expert Kees Kousemaker on a history of Dutch comics before becoming a full-time artist in 2005, with commissions in publications as varied as Yes, Zij aan Zij, Viva Mama, Flo’, Jippo, Farfelu and NRC.Next.

In 2007 she began a series of cartoon philosophical reports for the newspaper Trouw, which prompted a perspicacious publisher to commission a complete book on this most ancient of topics. Filosofie in Beeld was released in 2010 and translated into English by NBM as Philosophy – a Discovery in Comics.

An inveterate questioner, she then turned her thoughts and pens to Religie in Beeld – which I’m assuming is “Religion in Comic Pictures” as I don’t think it’s been translated into English yet – before logically moving on to the third leg of the fabled Pillars of Wisdom.

Science – A Discovery in Comics is one more superb full-colour strip foundation course packed with information and gentle humour. Dissecting and disseminating the essence and fundamentals of a big, big subject in a subversively calm and accessible way, de Heer crafts her hypotheses and findings with the instruments of a gifted writer and synthesist and a master’s grasp of the medium.

This supremely engaging discourse opens with a searching ‘Prologue’ pointing out the core contradictions of supposedly unambiguous scientific thought before a few working definitions lead to a discussion of ‘What is Science?’ before the lectures begin with the core concept ‘The Beginning of Modern Western Science’.

This examination of the astounding achievements – and now obsolete observations – of Ancient Greece, paying particular attention to ‘Thales of Miletus’, ‘Anaximander’, ‘Pythagoras’, ‘Archimedes’ and ‘Euclid’ then elegantly diverts into a discourse on Mathematics, divided into ‘History of Math’ concentrating upon ‘Four Fascinating Mathematical Phenomena: Pi, Infinity, The Golden Ratio and Zero’.

Thos sagacious Greeks are represented here by ‘Aristotle’ who laid the foundations of ‘The Scientific Method’…

Science in the Middle Ages is covered ‘…At a Glance’ and through ‘The Medieval Worldview’, after which the subject switches to Chemistry, complete with a ‘History of Chemistry’, a quirky look at ‘the Periodic Table’ and some surprising things you didn’t know about famous scientists – and many who should be but aren’t.

A summary of where we’re at leads into the revelatory Mrs. Scientist which details just a few of the brilliant female thinkers and doers sidelined and short-changed by mainstream history before the journey resumes with a visit to The Renaissance paying particular attention to ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’.

Progressing to The Scientific Revolution where ‘New Ideas’ at last supplanted the accepted wisdom of the ‘Ideas of Aristotle’, the focus is on ‘Galileo Galilei’ and the destructive, increasingly toxic ‘Relationship Between Science and Religion’…

The section on Astronomy opens with ‘History of Astronomy’ and a glimpse at ‘Space’ after which Newton gets his own chapter, culminating in a brilliant explanation of ‘Newton’s Laws’ before the spotlight falls on Physics…

Following the preliminary and compulsory ‘History of Physics’, a short treatise on ‘Three Sub-areas of Physics: Electricity, Thermodynamics and Motion’ as visually verified in ‘Classical Mechanics’ takes us to The Nineteenth Century – Age of Discoveries with a potted history of ‘Charles Darwin’ evolving into the furore surrounding ‘Natural Theology’ and a section on the new discipline of Biology…

‘History of Biology’, naturally results in a thorough examination of ‘Genetics’ and a personal moment for Margreet and Yuri as they take advantage of a very modern facility in ‘The Chromosome Chronicles’.

Geology surfaces next with ‘History of Geology’, revealing and revisiting the protracted debate over ‘The Age of the Earth’, ‘History of the Earth’ and ‘History of Man’.

Einstein of course, rates a section to himself, and ‘Albert Einstein’, ‘The Theory of Relativity’ and ‘Funny Facts’ happily lead to the contentious Quantum Theory,

This doctrine divided theoreticians for most of the 20th century – as seen in ‘History of Quantum Theory’ – examining the confounding paradox of ‘Wave and/or Particle’, ‘The Classical Worldview’ versus ‘The Quantum Worldview’ and asks ‘Next Stop: a Theory of Everything?’

And because proper science is about sharing knowledge, this scintillating speculation concludes with ‘Where are we Heading? – Science of the Future’, offering a quick survey of current affairs and prospective avenues of exploration…

This pictorial peroration also includes a handy page of recommendations of other books, films and graphic novels to check out, such as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything and Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Anna di Donna.

This is a truly sharp and witty book, which marvellously reduces centuries of contentious pondering, violent discussion and high-altitude academic acrimony to an enthralling, utterly accessible experience any smart kid or keen elder would be happy to experience.

Clear, concise, appropriately challenging and informatively funny, Science – A Discovery in Comics is a wonder of unpretentious, exuberant graphic craft and a timeless book we can all enjoy.

© @2012 Uitgeverij Meinema, Zoetermeer, TheNetherlands. English translation © 2013 Margreet de Heer.
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Perfect for anybody with a brain and a question… 9/10

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When I Was a Kid – Childhood Stories by Boey


By Cheeming Boey (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-785-3

The ability to go back into our childhoods and relive those bizarre, baffling and brilliantly fierce thoughts and every brand-new-day discoveries is a wondrous mixed blessing, but being able to share those recaptured experiences with jaded world-weary adults is a truly miraculous gift and thus utterly evergreen.

A recent admission to the select but august crowd of halcyon salad-days wranglers is Malaysian animator, illustrator, educator, video game developer and cartoonist Cheeming Boey – who also produces gallery art on Styrofoam coffee cups and draws an autobiographical webcomic about his life in America, entitled I Am Boey.

You should really check it out…

As a kind of prequel to his blog – if indeed growing up can be considered an introduction to a main event – Boey has collected a huge number of visual memoirs and epigrams about his im-maturing years in Asia, bundling them up in a beguiling paperback that emphasises both the exoticism of life in Malaysia and the universal similarities and solidarities of being a kid.

Warm, sensitive, intimate, uproarious, disarmingly honest as well as on occasion brutal, shocking and sad, these 103 visual monologues (with heart-warming family photos scattered throughout) are invitations into a world of wonder, rivalry, confusion, punishment, resentment, humiliation, anticipation, frustration, greed, glee and always the security of family.

They all begin with “When I was a kid…” and prove that, apart from the odd surface detail, every happy, loving childhood is identical…

The stand-out incidents include such salutary universal reminiscences as ‘My First Pet’, ‘Baby Powder’, ‘Bedtime Stories’, ‘Bad for your Eyes’, ‘Grandma’s Leg’, ‘Nasal Noodles’, ‘R-Rated’, ‘Stealing Money’, ‘Sunday Cartoons’, ‘Not a Genius’ and of course ‘Failing Math’ but with such a wide catalogue to choose from, every little cartoon episode will resonate with somebody. Especially you…

© 2011, 2013 Cheeming Boey. All rights reserved.

…And remember to visit www.iamboey.com
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: a total treat for the big kids paying for all the presents this year and every year… 9/10

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Last of the Mohicans: Ten-Cent Manga Series volume 1


Freely adapted from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper by Shigeru Sugiura, edited & translated by Ryan Holmberg (PictureBox)
ISBN: 978-0-985195-6-6

Those of us in the know tend to believe that Japanese comics began with Osamu Tezuka in the years following the end of World War II – and indeed in most ways that assessment is reasonable.

However, as the superbly informative article bolstering this superb and timely translation attests, there has been a thriving manga business operating in Japan since the 1930s, and one of its greatest proponents was artist and author Shigeru Sugiura.

This superb black and white hardback volume re-presents one of his greatest triumphs as the initial volume in a proposed series of “Ten-Cent Manga” collections translated and edited by Ryan Holmberg which will highlight lost works displaying not simply indigenous Japanese virtuosity but also the influence of cross-cultural contact and pollination with other countries such as America.

In his erudite and lavishly illustrated essay and appreciation ‘Shigeru Sugiura and his Mohicans’ Holmberg describes in fascinating and forensic detail the origins of the project, the state of play in Japan pre-and-post WWII and the absorbing life and career of an artist who began as a jobbing strip cartoonist yet elevated himself to the status of Psychedelic, Surrealist Pop Art icon – one utterly addicted to American movies and comicbooks.

The treatise is fully supported by documentary excerpts from the 1950s magazines and strips Sugiura scrupulously homaged and swiped from: Jesse Marsh’s Tarzan, Alex Toth’s Johnny Thunder, and particularly Fred Ray’s Tomahawk being the most common amongst a wealth of graphic treasures synthesised and transformed into something fresh, vibrant and, most crucially, relevant to the entertainment-starved kids of occupied Japan.

Also included is an article by the artist himself, written in 1988 and describing his life-long passion for and debt of influence to American cinema – most especially ‘Silent Movies’…

However, although scholarly and revelatory, the text portions of this delightful tome pale beside the sheer exuberant energy and B-movie bravura of James Fenimore Cooper’s text…

Shigeru Sugiura (1908-2000) studied painting before becoming an art assistant to comics pioneer Suihō Tagawa. By 1933 he was creating his own strips for the gags and boys’ own adventure style comics that proliferated prior to the war. He returned to the industry when hostilities ended, producing more of the same but now influenced far more by the ubiquitous comicbooks of the occupying G.I.s than the silent Westerns and baggy-pants comedies he had voraciously consumed in his youth.

His blended comedy/action stories for children achieved great success throughout the 1950s, based on well known characters such as the ninja Sasuke Sarutobi or Chinese classics like Journey to the West, and he adapted modern themes like wrestling, science fiction and even Gojira/Godzilla to his fun-filled weekly pages in a most prolific and influential career.

…And Westerns; he did lots of rootin’ tootin’ shoot ’em up cowboy stories…

He very loosely adapted Last of the Mohicans in 1953 (when it was already a very familiar tale to Japanese readers) for Omoshiro Manga Bunko – a line of books presenting world classics of literature in comics form – albeit not exactly in any form recognisable to literary purists…

He retired in 1958 but returned in 1970, reworking old stories and creating new pieces from the fresh perspective of a fine artist, not a mere mangaka earning a precarious living.

In 1973 he was already refining and releasing his classic tales for paperback reprints when he was approached by Shōbunsha to update another. The 1953 Mohicans became the latest re-released tale, slyly reworked as a wry pastiche which kick-started Sugiura’s second career as a darling of the newborn adult manga market…

One word of warning: This is not your teacher’s Last of the Mohicans, any more than The Shining resembles Stephen King’s actual novel or the way the musical South Pacific could be logically derived from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific – or indeed how anything Alan Moore wrote could be found in films like From Hell or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…

Sugiura’s updated 1973-74 iteration forms the majority of this chronicle; a fast-paced story of non-stop adventure, greed, pride, tragedy and whacky humour where both the heroic frontiersman Leatherstocking and noble savage Chingachgook are re-imagined as bold young lads in bad times, their desperate quest punctuated with weirdly clashing moments of slapstick, creative anachronism, cross-cultural in-jokes and plain outright peculiarity…

It all works impossibly well, beginning with the introduction of Hawkeye, ‘La Carabine Kid’: a young but doughty colonial scout and spy for the British.

The Empire is at war with the French for possession of the New World, and the Kid and his companions have suffered many reverses at the brutal hands of the Mingos – a tribe allied to France and responsible for reducing the mighty Mohicans to two survivors; Chief Chinga and his son Uncas. 

The plot thickens when the Mingo Chief and his manic son Magua threaten to abduct Cora and Alice, daughters of British Colonel Munro, in an attempt to force the soldier to surrender his command East Fort to the French.

After a savage assault, Hawkeye, the Mohicans and dashing Major Duncan decide to escort the girls to the safety of Fort Henry, with the hostiles close behind…

En route they pick up itinerant preacher Father Gamut, before fighting their way on through wilderness and repeated Mingo attacks, always one step ahead of ‘Magua’s Pursuit’.

The struggle is not one-sided. The wily fugitives manage to blow up a French fort and even link up with a war party of Delas who subsequently reduce the ravening Mingos to scattered remnants – but not before the pursuers succeeding in carrying off ‘The Abducted Sisters’…

The scene is set for the heroes to rescue the girls and end Magua’s threat forever – but the showdown is costly and there is a high price to pay in ‘The Sad Ending’…

Sheer graphic escapism, spectacular storytelling and a truly different view of a time-honoured masterpiece make this an unmissable treat for all lovers of world comics.

This book is printed in ‘read-from-back-to-front’ manga format.

© 2013 the Estate of Shigeru Sugiura. Translation and essay © 2013 Ryan Holmberg. All rights reserved.
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: An ideal present for comics connoisseurs… 8/10

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Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations


By Peter Bagge with Joanne Bagge & Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-656-0

You probably know Peter Bagge as the fiery, wise-mouthed, superbly acerbic cartoonist responsible for incredibly addictive strips about the spoiled underbelly of American life which featured in such wonderful magazines as Neat Stuff and Hate, the inimitable Buddy Bradley stories or even his forays into the more-or-less mainstream such as DC’s Yeah!

But the savage graphic absurdist also has a politically active side. As both cartoonist and societal commentator he has produced strips and pictorial essays for the Libertarian publication Reason, a task joyously undertaken for more than a decade.

In 2009 a collection of his best strips (perhaps strip “op-ed” columns would be a better description) was released by Fantagraphics, and a more powerful argument for the concept of Free Speech you could not find anywhere.

Now that scintillating thought- and, if it’s doing its job right, expletive-provoking tome has been reissued, bolstered by a further 20 pages of unseen material as a superb hardcover compendium of insightful and sometimes controversial deliberation, observation and – when necessary – condemnation…

In a largely full-colour format, Bagge’s deliciously fluid drawings and razor-sharp polemical inquiries, rationalistic, deeply intimate quandaries and disbelieving observations skewer, spotlight and generally expose day-to-day aggravations and institutionalized insanities of modern urban life in 50 strips ranging from one to four pages in length.

Following faux EC cover ‘Tales of the Exploited’, cautionary tale ‘Common Misconceptions about the Other “L” Word’ and an introduction from Reason‘s Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie, the draughtsman’s contacts begin with a section devoted to (Stupid) War and judiciously deployed strips ‘Observations From a Reluctant Anti-Warrior’, ‘The War on Terror Never Ends’, ‘The Right to Own a Bazooka’ and ‘Confessions of a Lazy Anti-Warrior’ whilst (Stupid) Sex demands ‘Swingers of the World, Unite’ before fully exposing ‘The War on Fornication’…

(Stupid – you get the idea, right?) Arts covers such broad topics as ‘Just Say No to Live Clarinets’, ‘Now That’s Entertainment!’, ‘“Real” Art’, ‘Christian Rock’, ‘Sluts For Jesus’ and ‘The Life Cycle of a Hack’ whilst the nation’s true spiritual underpinnings are examined in Business via the results of extensive research into ‘Malls’, whilst advising ‘Just Say No to Intellectual Property!’ and confronting ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Tyrant’.

After further observing ‘Everyone’s a Winner’, ‘Latin Laissez-Faire’ and ‘Fine Dining at Shell’, the subject shifts to Boondoggles such as ‘My Very Own Monorail’, ‘Let’s All Give Money to the Rich Man!’, ‘Amtrak Sucks’ and ‘Detroit’, before Tragedy rears its subjective head with ‘A Menace to Society’, ‘The Beast That Will Not Die’, ‘Bums’ and ‘Caged Warmth’…

As you’d expect there’s lots to say about Politics beginning with ‘In Search of… an Honest Republican’ and ‘Confessions of a Serial President Hater Anti-Warrior’ before expanding to include ‘Let Us Deliberate..’, ‘Fascists Have Feelings, Too’, ‘In Search of… the Perfect Human’, ‘When Libertarians Gather..’ and ‘Shenanigans!’.

The most visual vitriol is reserved for Our Stupid Country, beginning with a dose of ‘Brown Peril’ and asking ‘Who’s to Blame for 9/11?’ before going on with ‘Ex-Pats Say the Darnedest Things’, ‘Junkie Logic’, ‘Celebrate Diversity’, ‘Do Your Own Thing Unto Others’, ‘Principal Stalin’, ‘Fair-Weather Idealists’, ‘…Or Don’t You Care?’, ‘The Nerd-ification of America’, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’, ‘What We Believe’, ‘What We Believe (This Month Anyway)’ and ending of course at ‘The Home of the Brave’.

This stunningly impressive collection closes with a dose of (Smart) Biography as Bagge recounts over twelve glorious pages the incredible life-history of brilliantly abrasive critic, journalist, author, proto-feminist, progressive social rebel and confrere/editor of Ayn Rand in ‘I.M.P. – an Abbreviated Retelling of the Life of Isabel Mary Patterson’ before the idol of the conservative Right and inventor of Objectivism gets her own brief workout in ‘Will Everyone Please Stop Freaking Out Over Ayn Rand?!?’

Bagge gives a damn good satirizing to such topics as Drugs Policy and attitudes, gun control, organized religion, birth control, sex education and abortion, teaching and schooling, homelessness and even Libertarianism itself – and assuming you’re too busy to look it up, we’re talking about a philosophy not a political party – although sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Libertarianism in its broadest form is simply the advocacy of Free Will and a belief in personal action and responsibility as opposed to the surrender of decision-making to others (for which take as given that we’re usually talking about Big Business and governments, not your Mum).

Challenging, iconoclastic and thought-provoking (or else what’s the point?) this is also a superbly entertaining and funny book. Bagge is the perfect inquisitor; impassioned, deeply involved and not afraid to admit when he’s confused, angry or just plain wrong. This wonderful use of brains, heart and ink ought to be compulsory reading before anybody is allowed to vote or even voice an opinion (now there’s a topic for discussion…)

All contents © 2013 Peter Bagge and Reason magazine, except Introduction, © 2013 Nick Gillespie. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Perfect for starting a family argument, that most precious of seasonal traditions… 9/10