Whores Of Mensa #5 back

Another very sharp package from one of Page 45's previous Comicbooks Of The Month, this is the party issue whose wraparound cover comes complete with a Peter Blake bacchanal tagged inside so you can see who's who, and it's cool to see that after all these years Jeremy Dennis Day still has blue hair! 'Larderella' inside is yet another example of her inspired and deftly dealt lunacy, a riff on Cinderella with an Oyster Card for transport and a more swiftly slippered Prince Charming.

Francesca Cassavetti evokes pre-teen birthday parties to perfection (along with the hots for a French boy), Cliodhna Lyons is too pooped from preparation to party, and Tanya MILKKITTEN Meditzky (another of our previous CBOTMs there) is so convincing about the twin origins of the conga line and Speakers Corner at Hyde Park that I must inevitably call her bluff. The game is given away by this little known nugget of geophysical history:

"Interesting fact - Hyde Park used to contain many inactive volcanoes but these were all flattened at the behest of Queen Victoria."

Ellen Lindner (our copies of UNDERTOW are usually signed and sketched in for free - and believe me, the sketches are gorgeous!) made me reach for the Oxford English Dictionary to learn what an incunabulum might be and my French/English dictionary in order to translate the title 'Scaphandre'. It's a diving bell and I suspect its 1928 heroine might be the titular butterfly of the relevant book/film (Le Scaphandre et Le Papillion).

The stand-out piece for me, however, was Patrice Aggs' 'Grace Jones Has Left The Building'. How many times in comics or film do you hear conversations running in parallel? Patrice pulls it off with an almost casual dexterity down at the hairdressers as rumours of Grace Jones attending a party which they've all been invited to in three hours time spiral out of control at the expense of a bride-to-be's hairdo and wedding dress. The portraits, body-language and line are all absolutely gorgeous.

Plus: what exactly lies within the adults-only Sachet Of Salaciousness? The sachet and my lips are both sealed.

Preview here (Jeremy Dennis Day is top right).