Now Read This!

By Will & Desberg, translated by Michael Koch (Eurotica/NBM)
ISBN: 1-56163-009-8

If you’re old enough to remember the 1960s you might recall the twin popular fascinations of Victoriana (a plethora of books, films and TV shows set in those heady days of Empire) and Sex.

Actually there had always been sex, but in England no-one had seen or done any since before the War. What occurred during the Civil and Social Rights liberalisation of the “Summer of Love” was that heaping helpings of sauciness and skin started to creep into the media. Eventually we’d even sink so low that photographs of naked young ladies would replace cartoons and comic strips as the best way to sell newspapers.

It didn’t take long before period fiction – especially films – added lots of salacious, cheerful nudity and entrendres (double and single) to their product.

In the manner of that innocently rude time (and such classics as The Best House in London and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones) is this lovely slice of Euro-whimsy from Will and Desberg. Willy Maltaite, one of the Continent’s greatest and most prolific artists, worked for Spirou on the fairytale fantasy ‘Isabelle’ among many others. In the 1980s he worked with comics writer Stephen Desberg on a series of light-hearted albums for adults (European adults, so the sex is tasteful, beautifully illustrated and sardonically funny) that our chuckle-parched, po-faced world could well use now. As far as I know The Garden of Desire is the only one of their works to lapse into English.

It follows the amorous antics and career of Michael Loverose, whose well-to-do English mother was seduced by a mysterious stranger. The resulting embarrassment was packed off to boarding school as soon as possible and from there he roamed the wide world in search of love and adventure – but mostly love…

Spanning the turn of the 20^th century to the heady days between the World Wars this sly and gentle tale luxuriously blends comedy, self-exploration and innocent lust with a tiny dose of real magic in a way only those sophisticates across the Channel can.

Great fun perfectly executed and a style of story we should be revisiting in these pell-mell, oh-so-serious modern days.
© 1988 Will-Desberg/Ed. Dupuis Charleroi Belgium. © 1991 NBM for the English Translation. All right reserved.

By Paul Kirchner (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 0-87416-043-X ISBN-13: 978-0-87416-043-7

In the 1980s American comics got a huge creative boost with the advent of high quality magazines such as Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated which showcased adult-oriented material with high quality graphics and formats such as had taken Europe by storm a decade earlier. Previous US experience of such work had been limited to the Underground Comix scene – in terms of content if not production values, at least – and the occasional independent experiment of such maverick luminaries as Wally Wood and Jim Steranko.

When Heavy Metal first launched in April 1977 (looking very much like its French conceptual “parent” Métal Hurlant, there was precious little original home-grown material to supplement the sumptuous continental work therein. One of the first creators to join the magazine was Paul Kirchner, who had worked as an assistant to Wally Wood in the early 1970s, contributing to such Woody-associated projects as Big Apple Comics.

Born in 1952, Kirchner was in his third year at Cooper Union School of Art in New York when Neal Adams and Larry Hama introduced him to the horror editors at DC, whose anthology titles always needed fresh blood. He assisted Tex Blaisdell on Little Orphan Annie and in 1973 joined Ralph Reese at Wood’s studio.

His starkly surreal strip The Bus debuted in Heavy Metal in 1978 and ran intermittently until 1985. During this time Kirchner was seeking something more meaningful for his creative energies and the tales collected in Realms (both colour and monochrome and all previously published in either HM or Epic) are the results of that search.

All the strips come from the period 1975-1986, and the book starts with a single-page pastiche of EC comics entitled ‘They Came From Uranus!’ before the main event begins with the fantasy quest ‘Tarot’, a meticulously rendered gem of magic, motorcycles and lost civilisations. ‘Shaman’ relates a duel in the spirit-lands between two Mexican Brujos (sort of wizards or wise-men) whilst the visually stunning ‘Hive’ examines two of life’s biggest puzzles: Work and Sex.

‘Mirror Dreams’ uses rogue Ronin and Shinto sages to examine the nature of reality, whilst ‘A Spirit of Thaxin’ utilises eye-watering black and white line, hatching and feathering to produce a sardonic tale of demonic servitude that owes much stylistically to the artist’s old boss Wally Wood.

Shorter monochrome vignettes close out the book, punchy little gags and vignettes with an adult sting in the tail. ‘The Temple of Karvul’, ‘Pillars of P-11507’, ‘Critical Mass of Cool’, ‘Survivors’, ‘My Room’ and ‘Judgement Day’ are a blend of surrealism, visual punning and broad satire that typified the best of Tharg’s Future Shocks from Britain’s 2000AD – and probably were intended for the same kind of reader.

As well as a successful career in toy and product design, Kirchner has worked for the New York Times, worked on licensed comics featuring RoboForce, He-Man, GoBots, ThunderCats, G.I. Joe, and Power Rangers and has produced occasional books as varied as Trajectories, Big Book of Bad, Big Book of Losers, and the seminal Murder by Remote Control written with Zen Buddhist Janwillem van de Wetering.

This early compendium is more indicative of the artist’s astounding drawing ability, but nevertheless still offers a refreshingly engaging spread of fun and fantasy for adult readers.
© 1987 Paul Kirchner. © 1987 Catalan Communications. All Rights Reserved.