Archive for December, 2014

Philippa Rice & Luke Pearson signing & sketching on Valentine’s Day 2015 at Page 45

Wednesday, December 31st, 2014

Page 45 flirtatiously presents a love-struck liaison:

Philippa Rice & Luke Pearson co-signing the new SOPPY h/c

 

We are infatuated!

SOPPY #1 by Philippa Rice and co-starring Luke Pearson has sold over 200 copies at Page 45 with SOPPY #2 some 150! Who says self-publishing doesn’t sell?! (Rhetorical.)

Now SOPPY becomes a pocket-sized hardcover so substantially expanded that it is a brand-new beast with a narrative all of its own. Oh, those early days of tentative texting and waiting for one back!

Learn how Luke and Philippa first met! See them at the cinema for the very first time! Dote on them dining out!

 

 

Warning: there will be brief bursts of domestic ding-dong as the two fall out over nothing. Sound familiar? Behold the miraculous, healing power of a milkshake! Behold the miraculous, healing power of a “Sorry” then moving so swiftly on!

There will be free promo items on the day!

Oh, my sentimental souls, there will indeed be free promo items supplied by Square Peg / Random House like the Philippa Rice postcard above and the wrapping paper below AND by and Flying Eye / Nobrow like these very Luke Pearson HILDA postcards!

*SQUEALS!*

 

 

The time: 4pm to 6pm
The date: Valentine’s Day, Saturday 14th February 2015
The place: Page 45
Admission: Free

Just queue at the counter and we’ll run it like clockwork!

 

Also: Free Scribbles And Squiggles!

Philippa and Luke will sign all their own books – as many as you care to bring or buy on the day – and they will each sketch in one of them for free!

The sketch doesn’t have to be in SOPPY – though they will co-sketch in that if you fancy – Philippa’s sketch, for example, could be in WE’RE OUT wherein Page 45 appears on its 45th page! Luke’s could be in one of his glorious, British Comics Awards-winning Young-Adult HILDA graphic novels on sale at Page 45, as ever, on the day.

More on both creators’ books below, but here for the very first time is our preview of the SOPPY hardcover published on 8th January 2015.

Soppy h/c (£10-99, Square Peg / Random House) by Philippa Rice.

Rarely have I been so immediately, directly and profoundly touched by such an intimate work of art. There is a purity here both in the content and in the lines and shapes which depict this autobiographical insight.

It’s dedicated to Luke Pearson, creator of the glorious, thrilling, luxurious, British Comics Awards-winning Young-Adult HILDA graphic novels and Philippa’s own beau as he bends down gently to photograph a flower. That pretty much sets the scene for this most tender of relationships.

“We’ve had a letter addressed to both of us!” declares Philippa on their first shared envelope and they beam at it as proudly as parents.
“So what is it?”

A house-warming welcome? A Christmas card? A Wish-You-Were-Here…?

“Our first gas bill.”

See them trudge through the rain hand in hand, P’s hoodie high while Luke buries his chin in his scarf! Oh, but there’s grumpy old pout on Philippa’s rosy-cheeked face! I defy you not to emulate it the second you see that page: it is infectious.

Once home with Luke working late, Philippa pops her head round the door of his study then returns wrapped in an enormous, brightly spotted duvet. The next and final panel sees her face-down on the floor, sunk into the thick, billowing folds of the duvet which looks a big, furry carapace, only the top of her head poking out, tortoise-like, to read a graphic novel, hands-free.

Everything is so perfectly placed: the two of them shifting round their bed at night, back-to-back then wrapped round each other in rotating combinations. The curves there are delicious: the contours of Luke’s pants round his bottom and Philippa’s night shirt round her waist and chest. She has an incredible sense of form and body language. It’s actually very brave of both of them to bring such joy to the world by revealing so much of themselves. Though there was a bit of a misprint which revealed far more!

Far from cloying, this is above all gently comical. You might think you know all there is to know about Philippa’s craft from WE’RE OUT, ST. COLIN AND THE DRAGON, LOOKING OUT, MY CARDBOARD LIFE and RECYCLOST, but this is cut from completely different cloth, and it is absolutely beautiful.

Here’s Luke and Philippa on the couch in front of their television set which is filling the late-night living room with the most lurid scenes of gore and evisceration. Philippa shrinks into Luke’s shoulder, hiding behind his knee.

“If I got zombied, would you shoot me?” asks Luke later, his arms wrapped around her.
“No,” she replies looking up into his eyes. “I’d let you bite me.”

Luke presses his forehead into her hair, blissed out by the answer, but it’s the expression on Philippa’s face which does it: utterly aghast and taking the question quite, quite seriously.

It’s romantic precisely because it is not some far-flung, far-fetched, passionate whirlwind set against the backdrop of an exotic Africa, desperately trying to save several species in decline while corrupt politicians connive with poachers to fur-line their pockets from the indigenous and the endangered. It’s Philippa Rice and Luke Pearson reading in bed or doing the dishes, falling asleep on top of each other in front of some late-night TV. The daily domestic routines are the best: Luke, hands in marigolds so diligently deep in the suds-filled sink, racking up a stack of clean bowls and plates; Philippa deciding that now is exactly the right time to make herself a sandwich. It’s the final panel that does it, as Philippa deposits her dirty plate by the sink with most beatific smile in the world, Luke pausing with a soapy hand on his hip.

As to walking home with the shopping, I am exactly the same: fresh baguettes, eh? I never can wait.

One of the funniest pages begins with a little mardy misdirection, because I’ve never seen this expression on Philippa’s face. I’ve seen ‘puzzled’, I’ve seen ‘thinking the question over’, and I’ve seen ‘seriously concerned for others’. But mostly all I’ve witnessed is ‘radiating happiness’ like the best dressed sunshine imaginable. I’ve never seen the cross-patch here, deep-furrowed frown accentuated by enormous blotches of fire-red cheeks as if there’s a furnace of rage burning inside.

In fact I find this so unlikely that I call Philippa on it: I think she’s doing a Joe Decie and making it up.

Includes two different end-papers which I reckon are worth the price of admission alone. You’ll see!

SLH

Buy Soppy h/c and read the Page 45 review here

“That sounds amazing, I need to pre-order!”

You really do!

The book is out now and we ship worldwide but you can also order SOPPY from Page 45 in advance of the signing (and everything else that you fancy) and select “collect in store” then it will be ready and waiting for youwith no postage to pay on Valentine’s Day. We will not sell your copy to anyone else!

If you can’t make that day Page 45 guarantees that all orders placed from anywhere in the world, online or in store, before 7th February will be signed by Philippa Rice and Luke Pearson for free but you must ASK for this service or they will be dispatched immediately upon ordering, squiggle-free!

By Philippa Rice, we have:

WE’RE OUT
ST. COLIN AND THE DRAGON
LOOKING OUT
MY CARDBOARD LIFE
RECYCLOST

Plus

NELSON
HIC & HOC ILLUSTATRATED JOURNAL OF HUMOUR (UK)
Page 45 Philippa Rice greetings card

By Luke Pearson, we have:

HILDA AND THE TROLL
HILDA AND THE MIDNIGHT GIANT
HILDA AND THE BIRD PARADE
HILDA AND THE BLACK HOUND
EVERYTHING WE MISS
SOME PEOPLE

Plus

NELSON
FAIRY TALE COMICS h/c
ABOVE THE DREAMLESS DEAD: WWI IN POETRY & COMICS

Keep Up To Date:

Page 45’s website news

Page 45’s twitter @pagefortyfive

If you have any questions now or on the day, please phone 0115 9508045.

Happy New Year!

– Stephen

 

 

Look, this is US! It is Page 45!!! x

 

Page 45 Reviews December 2014 week four

Wednesday, December 24th, 2014

I don’t eat children. I just think it’s wrong

 – Stephen on his Food & Drink interview underneath the reviews

Saga vol 4 (£10-99, Image) by Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples.

“So yeah, your pet just menstruated all over the living room.”

If you think that’s easily fixed with a little hydrogen peroxide, that pet is a walrus.

Our fastest-seller series of trades, SAGA is above all a comedy romance in a science-fiction setting which is light on the science and thrilling in its fiction. J-Lo and I both emphasise its complete unpredictability. Who knew, for example, that we would suddenly fast-forward to when Alana and Marko’s baby Hazel is now a toddler?

This gives father Vaughan even more material to mine for your mirth because as well as exhausting you and plaguing you with lurgy after lurgy like some bacterial relay race, these miniature biological warfare agents don’t half land you in it, don’t they? The things they blurt out!

Jonathan’s own three year old nutjob flashed me her knickers the other day from the backseat of Joanna’s car. As they drove away she said, “He’s a nice man. He’s a very nice man”. That one’s going to be trouble as a teenager.

 

Here Hazel lands Marko in it several times but I won’t reveal how. I will remind you of how epic the series will prove to be, however, in that an adult Hazel is its narrator.

“Soak it up, I’m not always this adorable.”

Owning an invaluable sense of retrospect, the narration can clobber you with a prediction or two which you know to be true and the concluding words to the very first chapter will tear your heart asunder.

Boy, I’m being mean tease today!

Marko and Alana have been on the run almost ever since they were first thrust together. She’s from the planet Landfall; he’s from its moon. They’re not just from different races, they are entirely separate species and those species have been at war for what seems like forever. Marko went to the frontline and didn’t like what he saw so he surrendered to his enemy. Alana was his jailor; she freed him. Miraculously they are the first inter-species couple we know of in this context who have successfully bred.

As traitors – blasphemers, even, with loving coupling and progeny – they have each been hunted by their respective species using agents like Prince Robot IV from a race of walking, talking, fornicating television sets and the assassin The Will with his Lying Cat. Even their brief bout of tranquillity in SAGA VOL 3 came at a cost and before that they were crammed together in a solitary lighthouse, confined to each other’s company.

Now… now they have finally settled down in relevant safety on the planet of Gardenia and have found time to spend outside each other’s company. And that’s important, isn’t it? I think it’s important. It’s something I learned from Kahlil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’:

“Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.”

It’s one of the most important books I have ever read, and I read it a lot.

Marko looks after Hazel during the day, taking her out to parks (albeit in bandages as some war-wound disguise); Alana has found a job under an assumed name and wearing a wig on the Open Circuit, an interactive TV performance troupe. It makes a substantial sum of revenue through product placement. As one of her fellow, pragmatic actors says…

“This part of the gig isn’t performing, it’s promoting. I’d refuse but I’ve got a dad in assisted living and three sisters who don’t feel like assisting with shit.”

We do what we do to get through. On the subject of which, fortunately there is assistance on offer in the form of a recreational drug called Fadeaway and I have to tell you that Fiona Staples – improbably, I know – excels her already swoonaway standards in a sequence where colours swirl, roses melt and the world accordions out, leaving Alana blissfully floating all foetal-like as though in utero

There are so many more Fiona Staples flourishes – one of which we get to in the very next paragraph – but I especially adored those involving the family of Prince Robot IV. For in a sub-plot his wife gives birth to a perfectly formed, portable, bi-pedal TV set, and there are two particular broadcasts (their TV-screen heads transmit what they think) which blew me away. One involves rain as you’d see cascading down your window. It is not what you think; it is not.

And you know how I wrote of SAGA VOL 3 that it included “the best-ever use of The Lying Cat”, that turquoise, furless feline compelled to expose lies like a tabby with Tourette’s syndrome?

SLH

Buy Saga vol 4 and read the Page 45 review here

The Graphic Canon Of Children’s Literature (£25-99, Seven Studies) by various, edited by Russ Kick.

Aesop, Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Leo Tolstoy (!), Jules Verne, Edward Lear, J.M. Barry, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Richard Adams, J.K. Rowling… some Russians, Europeans, Peruvians and Norse narrators practising the time-honoured oral tradition of passing stories down the generations so that they now arrive to delight this one before all the hideous sanitisation crept in.

Hans Christian Andersons ‘The Little Mermaid’ was not the wince-inducingly twee and anodyne dross that Disney turned it into. Here the magnificent MEATCAKE’s Dame Darcy reclaims the tale (emphatically in black and white) with her traditionally macabre, Victorian gothic style, while THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH’S Isabel Greenberg tackles ‘The Tinderbox’.

Roberta Gregory’s here, as are Peter Kuper and Noah Van Sciver (look out for SAINT COLE come February!)

I haven’t had time to read all of them (this album-sized collection runs to 450 pages!) but the knock-out pages for me came from Lesley Barnes’ ‘The Firebird’, played like a paper puppet theatre with (love the subtle shadows which give the feathers etc a sense of relief!) the sort of sumptuous colours one associates with India.

SLH

Buy The Graphic Canon Of Children’s Literature and read the Page 45 review here

In The Frame 2012-2014 (£12-00, Solipsistic Pop) by Tom Humberstone.

Pertinent and poignant, with a well judged sense of what will make you crack a wry smile or a big, broad grin, a lot of lateral thinking has gone into these pithy New Statesman strips. If you think you need to know a lot about politics to savour this sweetmeat strike-othon, I offer you immediate relief.

Here’s Putin being threatening with sanctions.

“Oh my! Not sanctions!
“How ever will I manage!
“I scoff at your sanctions! I sanction you!
“I sanction your face!
“You’re not my real parents!
“You don’t control me.
“Also, I’ve annexed the hallway and you’re intruding on my personal space right now.”

Like the best political cartoonists, Tom takes his subjects and gives them a popular context, a big, juicy twist and a fresh perspective often by flipping them upside down. ‘Regeneration of the Planet Of The Apes’, for example, goes with the flow of the films in which chimps inherit the Earth and make it their own… here by replanting the trees which we’re hacking down to make empty, ugly, artificial golf courses or great big concrete eyesores.

Yes, specific politicians come in for the rogering they so richly deserve: Michael goddamn Gove, David transparently mendacious Cameron, Nigel I-love-a-good-pint-like-any-other-racist Farrage and Boris seems-like-a-buffoon-but-that-makes-him-all-the-more-dangerous Johnson… but largely it’s more social than political, embracing the everyday so these say something to you about your lives.

Environment Ministers posing for photos in a flood, looking as they care about the community they have betrayed by doing nothing to reverse the climate change which has left it so vulnerable to more and more misery…

Art. Advertising. Equality. Protest marches and the media which report them (or don’t; or do so with such bias as to whip up fear).

My favourite is ‘Why not spend your Easter holiday in Isolationist England?’

Humberstone manages to cram in so many issues as a happy family play in the sand behind a fenced-up suburbia under the watchful gaze of a full four street cameras marked GCHQ.

“We’re ostracising all our neighbours so we have plenty of space!
“Better build a moat around that sandcastle!
“Everywhere’s too expensive to live, so don’t stay too long!
“You’ll certainly be safe. Or at least carefully watched!
“Not convinced? Look at the royal baby. Look at his cute little face!”

From the creator of ELLIPSIS of whom Dan Hancox writes, “In spite of everything, Tom never lets snark or sheer exasperation win the day.” And he doesn’t. Although that last one comes close!

SLH

Buy In The Frame 2012-2014 and read the Page 45 review here

Thief Of Thieves vol 4: The Hit List (£10-99, Image) by Andy Diggle & Shawn Martinborough.

“This book is a weapon, and I aim to use it.”

Diggle doesn’t miss, I assure you. I love a turn of phrase like that.

Gone, however, is the comedy. THIEF OF THIEVES used to be riddled with mischief but the smirk has been wiped off its face. It’s been wiped off Redmond’s too.

How does the most spectacularly successful, efficient and proficient wool-puller in the world manage to land himself in increasingly dire straights by the end and so beginning of each successive book? Here he’s in a police cell in Rome, being threatened with a cut-throat razor by a Chief Inspector on behalf of Italian mafia godfather Don Parrino.

Well, he liberated a ledger from Don Parrino’s palazzo in Venice. It contains a list of political and police payoffs and its blackmail gold or dynamite depending on how you look at it. In this world information is everything and Redmond will need to be economical with what he disseminates if he’s going to survive the police, Parrino and – back home – the bloodthirsty Lola. When you finally find out what that sadist has been fiddling with in his fingers you will wince. This gets very nasty indeed.

The lighting by Adriano Lucas is as ever a joy whether by a sun-bathed poolside or late into an explosive night, and I couldn’t imagine this series without Shawn Martinbrough’s bold forms and implacable stares.

There is more to come but you can consider this a finale of sorts, with the cast is substantially culled by its conclusion. I’d probably mop the floor now for your jaw will be greeting it shortly.

Oh, okay the comedy’s not altogether gone. There are always those multiple little sub-titles like…

“Home Again,
“Home Again,
“Jiggety-Jig”

… as Redmond is confronted with the burned out shell that used to be his shore-side luxury home.

SLH

Buy Thief Of Thieves vol 4: The Hit List and read the Page 45 review here

Silver Surfer vol 1: New Dawn (UK Edition) s/c (£10-99, Marvel) by Dan Slott & Mike Allred.

This, let me tell you, has a Wow Factor 50.

“Wishes are powerful things, herald. Especially if you believe in them.
“They might just become your future.”

Memories! Metaphysics!

A monkey mashing cymbals together to the beat of the Never Queen’s heart!

Mike Allred has always been a wonder and is an inspired choice for this book.

Not for any old SILVER SURFER series – although he’s always shone with a Kirby sheen and here, with the Surfer’s gesticulations, reflects John Buscema’s tortured, soulful, doleful exile – but for this particular iteration for Dan Slott has brought his all to this book and thought well outside the box.

Unfettered from the relatively regimented confines of what a SPIDER-MAN series must be (although he did a commendable job of shepherding that series when it had multiple writers), Slott has blossomed and bloomed as if having ingested magic mushrooms while remaining 100% coherent.

Always it could have been anything for the silver one surfs the skies unknown but, now that I’ve seen and so believed, the SILVER SURFER should always have been this.

It takes quite the imagination to make such a break from tradition when tradition has become so established, so entrenched, but here be true wonders like The Impericon, “The Impossible Palace” and ‘eloquence’ seems an understatement to me.

“Our luxury suites are so massive, they have their own moon.”
“Impressive.”
“And that entire moon… is a nightclub. There are over six billion activities for the adventuresome. The Snowflower Slalom is one of my personal favourites.”
“That must damage the flora.”
“Quite the opposite. That white powder is their pollen. Our skis are their bees.”

Our skis are their bees! I have just melted with adoration and – I admit – envy that I never came up with that conceit, that sentence. There’s more.

“Our bazaar runs along our entire equator. Our shops never stop. Our stalls never –“

Stall.

Nor does Dan Slott, not once in this glorious, thrilling epitome of all that is possible if you are brave enough to first press the eject button then give me the tape.

Dawn’s escape from hostage as leverage – from her boxed-in cubicle presented as one of multiple adjacent comicbook panels – using amorphous Plorp’s acidic, regurgitated digestive juices is as ridiculous as it is wit-riddled as it is reminiscent of – but different to – Gillen & McKelvie’s YOUNG AVENGERS VOLUME 1!

Meanwhile only Allred could pull off this singular suspension of disbelief. Maybe Lizz Lunney or Philippa Rice or even Joe List, but I can’t think of many more comicbook creators capable of this. I love Laura Allred’s occasional dot-colouring when we go Power Cosmic. I love Laura Allred’s prime colouring throughout.

But let us return the beat of that heart before it became a cymbal-clashing simian.

“It’s – it’s beautiful. Can you hear it? That rhythmic beat? It’s every song you’ll never hear. Every hope and dream you’ll never have.”

This contains the first five issues of the current series then, at the back, the introductory short story as part of an anthology which I reviewed thus:

“My favourite was the not-yet-solicited SILVER SURFER which I am on board for purely on the strength of this left-field outing which I suspect may be informed by relatively recent Doctor Who. It’s not just the fact that the Surfer has a human companion: it’s her bubble-bursting irreverence and broader perspective on the potential for space exploration… together! It is a complete departure from any previous treatment of the surfing silvered one which has always been somewhat portentous and, being illustrated by Michael Allred, I was convinced I was reading Matt Fraction. (Please see FF VOL 1: FANTASTIC FAUX and its successors; please seem them – they’re brilliant!) I was wrong: it’s Dan Slott. Well done, Dan!

Together she and he visit an outer-space Venice to witness a fireworks display composed of cosmic rays. I am not going to spoil Slott’s joke, but it’s a good one delivered with a deft slight of hand relying on Marvel readers’ inescapable knowledge of a certain phenomenon. (Truly and trust me: this one is inescapable.) Its ten pages are packed with wit and I wonder if this is Allred’s true calling as – via Kirby – one of Moebius’ most successful successors. Let’s see if he goes there.”

He does go there, boldly, like no one has gone there before.

SLH

Buy Silver Surfer vol 1: New Dawn (UK Edition) s/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Authority vol 2 s/c (£18-99, DC) by Mark Millar, various & Frank Quitely, various.

“Why do super-people never go after the real bastards?”

Now that is a very good question.

In Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch’s blistering series of pyrotechnic crescendos which was AUTHORITY VOL 1, Jenny Sparks declared that they would make this a better world whether we liked it or not. Having defended the Earth against alternate dimensions and the closest thing to God, The Authority now turns its attention to Earth’s own dictators, reasoning that if they’re going to risk their lives defending this planet, it ought to be one worth saving. Or at least one they like.

Unilaterally they decide to depose a tyrannical regime in Southeast Asia and, led by Jack Hawksmoor, they do so with military precision and a ruthless efficiency. They use that swift and effortless victory in Southeast Asia – along with the somewhat intimidating shadow of their 50-mile-high shiftship – to persuade the Russian army to back off from Chechnya and China to withdraw from Tibet.

When was the last time you saw an invasion force persuaded to retreat without a single shot being fired? You would have thought that a nation allegedly espousing democracy enough to oppose dictatorships and invade their sovereign states would welcome these moves, but the American government is far from happy.

“Just watch your step, Mister Hawksmoor.”
“Frankly we could say the same to you. Mister President.”

Brrrr. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

It was a subtle game Mark Millar played for we rooted for the liberal-leftie, anti-establishment authoritarians without at first realising that paradox. Because as liberal-lefties ourselves we happened to agree with their stance. Also because we’d do it too, wouldn’t we? Give me virtually limitless power and I would be the first to intervene geo-politically.

Millar also won our affections with extreme prescience, inventive lateral thinking and a seemingless limitless wit. Here Jack Hawksmoor asks the normally masked Midnighter what has become of his trademark leather uniform. Well, adopting a small child changes more than you can possibly anticipate:

“Baby Jenny vomited all over it and I had to order a new one.”
“Couldn’t you just have cleaned it?”
“Milk doesn’t come out of leather no matter how hard you clean. Cow’s revenge, I suppose.”
“Makes sense.”

As to the lateral thinking, The Authority are first assaulted by a decommissioned Cold War U.S. enterprise, 42 levels above Presidential Clearance, which has no intention of letting The Authority get in the way of its own plans for a unilaterally-imposed worldwide Utopia, cheers. It is the brainchild of Professor Krigstein, immediately identifiable by his small stature and burning cigar as seminal superhero artist Jack Kirby:

“The kind of man who could probably have created all your favourite comicbook characters if he hadn’t been snapped up by Eisenhower at the end of the war.”

Half the fun there is identifying the Marvel characters Jack ‘King’ Kirby did indeed create for Marvel, now perverted into a bunch of bigoted rapists etc. Start with the original Avengers and the rest may fall into place or, if you’re struggling, ask me at the counter!

Which brings us to Frank Quitely. I wish this was all drawn by Frank Quitely. Hell, I wish this was all written by Mark Millar but, as promised, we will get to that in a bit.

Artists Chris Weston, Art Adams and Gary Erskine all delivered their ever-reliable goods, but Frank Quitely was on fire: those analogues were so witty. His forms were much more burly than we’d been used to from Bryan Hitch but that worked brilliantly: they weren’t just super-human, they were meta-human. Michelangelo did the same thing, especially to his women. I loved his constantly puckered lips too – largely the guys’.

With his analogue to Giant Man he achieved in scale what Hitch went on to in THE ULTIMATES and Luke Pearson did with HILDA AND THE MIDNIGHT GIANT by bending the man down yet, even so, failing to fit the full figure into the panel. It’s deliberate, trust me: that’s how it works.

And so we come to the sadness of it all. I was very much hoping – with this material now being re-released as definitive, collated editions – that DC under a new editorial regime rather than the one which went so fearfully, so destructively and so despotically awry might have corrected its irrational errors and given us a book that we could be proud to sell rather than one which we must, in all good consciousness, be apologists for.

What you read, increasingly throughout this volume, was not written by Mark Millar even when his name was slapped on it. It was rewritten by editors. What was drawn was not what was first intended. Under the Page 45 reviews blog where this review was first published (December 2013 week four and now December 2014 week four ) you will find a meticulously researched if not exhaustive article on how much criminal damage was done to this work which DC could have been proud of, but which their own sexuality-related timidity turned into a travesty.

The worst offence is not catalogued there. DC’s worst offence, as reported at the time by Rich Johnston, was excising this single sentence:

“You just pissed off the wrong faggot.”

Did DC believe that the word “faggot” was beyond the pale? It did not. It happily printed it as sneered and espoused by a homophobic supervillain at the Midnighter’s expense, and happily reprints it all here. But when, in a scene harking back to Wolverine during X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX SAGA, The Midnighter comes to retake the English language in an act of self-empowerment (for he is gay and his beloved boyfriend has been brutally abused to breaking point), he no longer says…

“You just pissed off the wrong faggot.”

But, limply…

“You boys just pissed off the wrong bastard.”

It really isn’t the same.

Here is a couple of sentences from the final page of this book aimed not at the protagonists within but the people who publish it, from my original review of the final issue:

‘”Do you think we made a difference in the end?”
“God yes, are you kidding? Even with all the crap they threw at us, we completely changed the landscape over the last twelve months.”

It was inevitable: The Authority’s radical stand was bad for the business of brainwashing. So it wasn’t the world’s governments who pooled together to take them down and replace them with a version they could control, it was the multi-national corporations who control them – who hire the world leaders to protect their tax breaks and overseas interests. Obviously enough the same can be said for comic itself, and for the very same reasons.

It had to be shut down and all under the excuse, the self-serving, printed (and, under the circumstances disgustingly offensive) lie that it had anything to do with the events of September 11th. We’ve been here before so I won’t belabour the point except to remind you that the finale to this blistering series you’ve loyally patronised with your hard-earned money is, I’m afraid, very much tainted by editorial treacheries, and the hard lesson is the same as The Authority had to learn:

Never, ever trust a fucking corporation.

SLH

Buy The Authority vol 2 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Assassination Classroom vol 1 (£6-99, Viz) by Yusei Matsui.

“Let’s write some free-verse poetry. I’d like you to end all your poems with the word ‘tentacles’.”

Thank god it’s free verse, then. I’ll have a go, shall I?

There’s a man who read Lovecraft
From the young age of four.
He pops in our shop now and then.
He wears fingerless gloves,
Paws our books,
Furtive looks
Seem to indicate that whenever he comes across anything by I.N.J.Culbard he is utterly freaked out, writhing as he is in his mind’s eye in a metaphorical sea of metadimensional tentacles.

Nope, I can’t do it.

The first half is a limerick of sorts, the second is certainly prose. Outside of W.B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy, unless it’s a song lyric I fucking hate poetry anyway. So poncy, just like me. Either that or it’s some sort of cryptic crossword and I’m useless at them as well.

This is bananas.

A school class has been assigned by the Japanese government to a metamorphic worldwide threat who has already cleanly carved out seventy percent of the moon, rendering it forever crescent. No more werewolves, clearly. He’s threatened to do the same to Earth unless his selected human pupils can successfully shaft him and he’s willing to teach them how. Unfortunately he can move at Mach 20 and regenerate any lobbed-off limb just like that.

How will they ever succeed?!

Oh, they probably won’t: this will go on forever and ever while Yusei Matsui rakes in merchandise royalties from our resident teacher who has been designed to have a spherical, grinning head complete with multiple expressions / colour schemes / patterns to denote various moods so that models can be made (and sold) with interchangeable –

KILL ME NOW!

SLH

Buy Assassination Classroom vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews as reviews. Neat, huh?

BOOM! Box 2014 Mix Tape (£7-50, BOOM!) by various

Lucifer Book 5 (£22-50, Vertigo) by Mike Carey & Peter Gross, Ryan Kelly, Colleen Doran, Zander Cannon, Dean Ormston, Aaron Alexovich, Michael Wm. Kaluta

The Manhattan Projects vol 5 (£10-99, Image) by Jonathan Hickman & Nick Pitarra

Sunstone vol 1 s/c (£10-99, Image) by Stjepan Sejic

Batman: Arkham Origins h/c (£16-99, DC) by Adam Beechen, various & Christian Duce, various

Green Lantern: Lights Out s/c (£12-99, DC) by Robert Venditti, various & Billy Tan, various

Marvel Masterworks: Warlock vol 1 s/c (£18-99, Marvel) by Roy Thomas, Mike Friedrich, Gerry Conway, Ron Goulart, Tony Isabella & Gil Kane, Bob Brown, Herb Trimpe, John Buscema, Tom Sutton

Dragon Ball 3-in-1 Edition vols 19-21 (£9-99, Viz) by Hinako Takanaga

Fairy Tail vol 45 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Hiro Mashima

Lone Wolf And Cub Omnibus vol 7 (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Naruto vol 68 (£6-99, Viz) by Masashi Kishimoto

NGE: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project vol 15 (£7-50, Dark Horse) by Osamu Takahashi

Souleater Not! Vol 3 (£9-99, Yen) by Atsushi Ohkubo

News

ITEM! Unbelievably cute! From the creator of WE’RE OUT and ST. COLIN & THE DRAGON etc, another fab Philippa Rice stop-animation short, “Is It Christmas Yet?”  This duo would win X-Factor. They make more convincing human beings that most of those contestants. (PS Fleur who came second…? She’s an exception: knock-out performances and obviously deserved to win. Obviously. Instead of that limp, bipedal piece of bleached tofu. I suspect racism and chauvinism, myself.)

ITEM! A not-at-all bad round-up of 25 of the most interesting graphic novels 2014. Far from flawless but some terrific choices too.

ITEM! Infinitely more inspired: 2014 Top Tens from Paul Gravett, comics’ greatest ambassador. I would take issue only with one (no clues!) while commending to you instead THE WICKED + THE DIVINE by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie and (beginning, middle and end – it is a two-parter) EXPECTING TO FLY #1 by John Allison and EXPECTING TO FLY #2 of which we have sold a shedload!

ITEM! Not unrelated: we have big news for you aaaaaaaaaaaaaaany second now. You follow me on Twitter, right? @pagefortyfive Of course you do, and I make no many apologies for everything I type. What a drunken fuckwit.

Funny, though, right?

ITEM! A reminder that STRANGEHAVEN is back, back, back and serialised in MEANWHILE which is still in stock. Its creator Gary Spencer Millidge done wrote a blog about it.

ITEM! It is coming towards the end of the year during which I get so sentimental because you make my life worth living. You. Yes, you! You support us with you craving for comics and your hard-earned cash, buy all the books which we love the most, and then you go online and Tweet or Bookface about our service. Please know that every single one of those signal boosts means the world to us: that you care enough to promote us to your friends and professional colleagues makes us melt.

Without you, we would be nothing. We would be sitting here twiddling our barely opposable thumbs.

Just the other day a local chocolatier whom Dee and I adore to bits went bust and closed down. I did what I could to promote them (and my Nottingham Post interview is reprinted underneath for your amusement) but evidently it wasn’t enough.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

2014: Page 45 Celebrated Its 20th Anniversary.

2014: Page 45 took its show on the road to The Lakes International Comic Art Festival and broke records, made promises.

2014: Page 45 bought its own building, 9 Market Street, thanks to Jonathan’s keen negotiations so securing its future forever without the potential interference of a capricious, mendacious, vampiric landlord.

Page 45: we love comics, we’re here to stay and we love each and every one of you to bits.

Behold, the surreal!

Nottingham Post Food And Drink Interview with Page 45 by Lynette Pinchess

Can you introduce yourself, please?

My name is Stephen L. Holland and 20 years ago this October I co-created the Page 45 comic shop which won the Nottingham Independents Best Business Award in 2012 and 2013, the Diamond Award for Best UK retailer in 2004, was shortlisted for The Bookseller’s Award for Best Independent Bookshop 2014 – the first-ever comic shop to be selected – and has just been nominated for the international Eisner Award 2014 which is comics’ equivalent of the Oscars. Pretty stoked!

What I lack in consumption of food I make up for in drink. You no longer hear of the European Wine Lake, do you? Well, I took care of that single-handedly. You’re welcome.

Favourite restaurant in Notts and why?

Piccolino in the Lace Market. It serves hearty and sexy Italian food, the complete opposite of those lank ‘80s pasta chains where everything tasted like it had been marinated in three-day-old dishwater. Plus this Tuesday night they squeezed me in well past serving time because they are very, very lovely. I did tip, yes.

Best for a romantic meal (in Notts)?

The Alley Cafe off Long Row. It’s so intimate. I mean really intimate: I don’t think they can squeeze more than 40 people in. If your official date goes wrong then there’s a good chance you’ll have made arrangements for another. Possibly by osmosis.

The food is vegetarian with optional vegan but packs such a punch that you’d think you were eating young puppies. Sorry, am I selling this to you?

Also: they promote local artists by giving them space on their walls, and Page 45 is all about promoting new voices, local voices and creativity.

A good restaurant to have a laugh with friends (in Notts)

I’ve not been thrown out of either of the above for laughing. That was something else entirely.

I’d hit Annie’s Burger Shack, recently relocated to the Lace Market. 30 ingenious ways of presenting a burger, be it beef, vegetarian or vegan.

Best for children (in Notts)?

I don’t eat children. I just think it’s wrong.

Best pub grub in Notts?

The Malt Cross. Scrumptious! Our own Jodie Paterson used to work there (Page 45 now stocks Jodie’s Paterson’s gift cards) and exhibits there frequently too in its upstairs gallery. You should so check her art out! http://jodiepaterson.co.uk/

Favourite takeaway food?

That I can summon a pizza via an incantation on my mobile phone is nothing short of magic. Magic should be practised sparingly lest it corrupt its practitioner, but I’ve discovered that there is a yawning chasm between self-knowledge and self-guidance.

The only quandary is calculating the value of value deals: do I go for 3 x 10” pizzas or 2 x 12” pizzas? Someone once drew me a pie chart but I ate it.

Live to eat or eat to live?

Oh, I live to drink. Nothing to me is more special to me than a conversation with much cherished friends over a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. By “glass” I mean “bottle”. And by “bottle” I mean “bucket”.

If I had to recommend a restaurant to a really fussy eater I would suggest….

Maltesers.

Perversely they now come in re-sealable packs. Hahahahahaha! You’re kidding, right?

Most memorable meal (anywhere) and why?

Almost every meal that involved a murder mystery. I’ve played them in private and performed them in public and always there are howls of laughter.

I’ve been the corpse, the killer and the policeman, but not on the same evening. When playing D.C. John Miller the diners did question my eyebrow ring but I told them I went undercover at raves. I’ve also played an abusive, gay boyfriend so vicious that my mother (a guest) didn’t speak to me for a month. Oh yes, and I’ve staggered into a dining room of 100 guests through a pair of French windows in nothing but a pair of Pants To Poverty boxer shorts, before collapsing and dying.

Hungry and needing food quickly, I’m most likely to….

Dash round to FABchocolats on Trinity Walk. New independent business with the most-melt-in-your-mouth chocolates ever. Myriam is Belgian. Actually, Myriam is an artist. Look! http://fabchocolats.co.uk/index.html

Fondest childhood memory of food?

Space Dust. It snapped, crackled and popped in your mouth. There’s an urban legend that it was banned for making kids explode. It was certainly the candy equivalent of crack cocaine.

 

And the worst?

My first-ever words were “Baked beans an’ horrible”. I couldn’t wait to get the hang of verbs: I felt a certain degree or urgency in getting the message across. *shudders*

What do you enjoy cooking at home?

Seared Tuna with butter-smothered new potatoes, minimally cooked carrots and sweet red pepper strips, drizzled in a balsamic vinegar and honey sauce. That sauce which I made up for myself is the key.

1) Take a red pepper, cut in two and remove all the gubbins (technical term for seeds etc)

2) Take a blow torch to the red pepper’s skin until black. If you have no blow torch then place skin-down on gas ring until charred. Place in plastic bag in fridge for half-hour then open and slide off the skin with a knife. Cut into strips.

3) Boil new potatoes. Also carrots (but not too much – they should give only a little).

4) Sear Tuna stakes in a frying pan. Approx 3 minutes on each side – judge by the centre of their sides.

5) Plate up the lot then pop those red pepper strips back in the pan with a whoosh of balsamic vinegar and an equally big dollop of honey or golden syrup. Let it bubble away until peppers are hot.

6) Pour red pepper strips in tangy sauce over carrots.

7) Devour!

Cookery book…or make it up as you go along?

Apart from the above, I’m shoddy at both.

Favourite celebrity chef and why?

No chef but a programme: the current John Torode and Gregg Wallace incarnation of Masterchef. Their eyes twinkle and their enthusiasm is infectious.

The food I would never touch is….

Meat, but I’m a complete hypocrite: I wear leather and do eat fish because they seem pretty stupid to me.

The best comfort food

Moules marinières with a fresh baguette or French fries. Maybe the moules are sentient and I will get clobbered in the Ever-After. It is a risk I am willing to take.

To me the most important thing about food is (provenance, taste, food miles, ethics, organic, cost, British?)

Remembering that I am fortunate enough to have some.

Which 4 famous people, dead or alive, would be your ideal dinner guests?

Australian singer, songwriter, musician and author Nick Cave; Rosa Parks who refused to budge off that bus; comicbook and prose author Neil Gaiman whom I have had lunch with and was full of stories; Tony Benn R.I.P. whom I was due to see at the Nottingham Playhouse last year but he fell ill and I now never will. He was that rarest of species: a politician with integrity and humanity. Kindness is what works for me.

My last meal would be….

Dim sum and egg fried rice from The Oriental Pearl in West Bridgford. Emphasis on their egg fried rice which is the best I’ve had anywhere in the world.

Obviously white wine would also be involved. I mean, obviously.

– Stephen

Page 45 Reviews December 2014 week three

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

Rodin’s hefty hands upon wrists in particular blow me away. With Fegredo the wrists are often set at similarly expressive angles. His figures dance across the page like Nijinsky, so lithe and supple, acting out each drama as choreographically required, while his street clothes are like few others’, their folds flopping or flapping in the breeze.

Stephen on The Enigma by Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo

The Great Salt Lake (£5-00) by Matt Taylor.

That’s quite the cover, I think you’ll agree.

And, to be fair, if the following four pages of majestic interior art don’t sell this to you solo, nothing I write is going to make a blind bit of difference.

After the whale dives below the boat the sailor’s mind drifts back to his loved one whose memory draws him ever on, and the ocean becomes a swollen challenge of creatures real and imagined.

For such a silent comic it doesn’t half fill your head with music. It’s like there’s a full orchestra in there for the forms are gigantic, rearing over the waves in inky pools of black or phantasmagorical white and, no, of course I’m not going to tell you what those forms are. It is, however, not entirely silent and the final page will give you much pause for thought.

 

 

 

I’ve seen some pretty special production values on our self-published, A5 beauties over the last few years from the likes of Becky Cloonan, Dan Berry and Robert M. Ball, but this one takes the Belgian-chocolate biscuit. The interior paper is almost as thick as the card stock cover and I can’t get over the illusion of it having French flaps!

Jonathan was thrilled to discover this while wandering round a convention this year: “Here’s something Stephen hasn’t come across yet!” Which is funny because, on the rare instances I stumbled upon something before Mark, I used to feel exactly the same elation. Exactly.

Alas for poor J-Lo, Matt had to tell him I’d already ordered our copies a fortnight before. Still, we are at least on the same page: this is arresting.

SLH

Buy The Great Salt Lake and read the Page 45 review here

Enigma s/c (£13-50, Vertigo) by Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo.

Poor Michael. He leads a mundane existence. He doesn’t really seem to count and nothing he does seems to matter.

“Sometimes he feels like a rumour drifting through a world of hard facts.”

Speaking of hard facts:

“Jesus! Where did that come from?”

Michael’s referring to his startlingly less than repressed hard fact poking out of his pants.

It isn’t his girlfriend who’s just turned him on. They only have sex once a week on Tuesdays and although it is indeed Tuesday night neither Michael’s spirit nor flesh was willing; both mind and body were weak. Until a news bulletin alerted Michael to the latest manifestation of the masked man known as The Enigma. That certainly aroused his interest.

You’re about to read a great many superlatives because this hugely underexposed work of sprightly wit and deftly delivered complexity means the world to me and I cannot tell you how euphoric I am that it is back in print. I re-read it today for the first time in over two decades and you know how sometimes you should never go back? How something which impressed you no end once upon a time then leaves you feeling like the younger you was more than a little jejune? Not this.

I want to talk to you about Duncan Fegredo first. This is where my love affair with the artist first began.

I’ve always referred to Fegredo as the Rodin of comics, and I rate Rodin right up there with Bernini. There is a weight to Rodin’s neoclassical sculptures as well as an emotional impact that’s often like reeling from a head-butt. I have been head-butted before so I know what that feels like and the whole of ENIGMA is like that, scriptwise and all. It is a revelation. It certainly will be for Michael.

Rodin’s hefty hands upon wrists in particular blow me away. Hands, wrists and forearms are right up there with the stomach when it comes to male beauty and well exceed anything else. With Fegredo the wrists are often set at similarly expressive angles. His figures dance across the page like Nijinsky, so lithe and supple, acting out each drama as choreographically required, while his street clothes are like few others’, their folds flopping or flapping in the breeze.

Duncan would be the first, second and third to not only concede but to bellow that the first couple of chapters here are overworked: way too many extraneous lines which do describe the forms but not like his later shadows sculpt them. By the time we get to chapters six, seven and eight this relatively young artist has transformed himself in front of us from startling and thrilling to stunning and accomplished. The opening full-page spread of chapter seven remains one of my all-time favourite pieces of comicbook art and I don’t think “startling and thrilling” is a bad starting point, do you?

On it Michael and The Enigma are post-coitally naked, and I know that I am telling you the plot but just this once, all right? Fegredo – in his gentleness of Michael’s wrist and hand and his lolling of Michael’s head – conveys everything you need to know about the dynamics of this sexual relationship. Milligan need not write a word.

He does, however, and every word he writes is delightful.

“An enigma is when a large chunk is concealed. An enigma is a riddle, a puzzle, an ambiguity.”

The Enigma was a three-issue comicbook written and drawn by Titus Bird which Michael cherished as a child. He lost those comics along with his Dad who died in an earthquake which swallowed his household whole. Michael was then abandoned on the sidewalk by his Mum who sealed her betrayal with a kiss. Twenty-five years ago a woman rose in rage and shot her husband repeatedly in the face before ditching her infant down a well.

Now The Head is sucking out brains through a tube, The Truth is confronting those who don’t want to hear it, The Interior League is redecorating lounges like nobody’s business, driving their occupants insane and The Enigma – masked in pure white porcelain and clothed more exquisitely than matador – is hovering aloof above it all.

What could this possibly have to do with Michael? What could this possibly have to do with The Enigma original comic’s creator, Titus Bird? What could this possibly have to do with Michael’s massive erection?

Please do not adjust your sets after the following sentence until you’ve read my follow-up.

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE’s Kieron Gillen has referred to this as the greatest superhero comic of all time. High praise from an impeccable source. Completely merited, and I can see where Kieron is coming from so I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But to describe it as a superhero comic at all would be like describing Oscar Wilde’s THE HAPPY PRINCE as a fairy tale. Which, umm, Oscar did.

My point is it will disappoint those looking for virtually pointless pugilism while putting the people it’s perfect for off. It’s closer to horror and romance and self-discovery. It’s more like the metafiction of Satoshi Con’s OPUS except that the meta is within the fiction itself, not pulling you out of it through its traditional, shattered fourth wall. Although I will concede that Milligan’s authorial voice is chatty and chummy and will speak to you directly.

“It’s like The Book Of Revelations but funnier. It’s like The Last Trumpet but hopelessly out of tune.

“It’s like the perennial battle between good and evil but no one can quite work out which is which anymore, and most people don’t even know what perennial means.

Some of us can barely spell it.

SLH

Buy Enigma s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Bad Machinery vol 3: The Case Of The Simple Soul (£14-99) by John Allison.

“Rain rain rain rain flipping RAIN, Mildred.
“What’s for dinner tonight?
“Wait no, don’t tell me, is it RAIN?”

Britain, eh? We have, like, two hundred words for rain. Outside the singularly British town of Tackleford it is torrential, and the page is lit to perfection in that strange, almost eerie off-greeny-grey that often accompanies an impenetrably stormy sky.

“We can get out of it in the barn, Lottie.”
“It smells like a bonfire.”
“Be careful not to sit on a rusty nail. That’s basically deadly.”

It smells like a bonfire because it was one. Someone’s been lighting up local wooden barns – accidentally or otherwise – and there’s so little left of this one that I’d probably keep that hood up, Lottie.

This, of course, is exactly the sort of mystery our two competitive teams of pre-teen detectives would be investigating but both are currently a proverbial man down. Linton and Sonny have lost Jack while Charlotte and Mildred are missing Shauna on account of Shauna and Jack are in lurve.

“Jack, Wouldn’t it be romantic is we were run over by a combine harvester together?”

Hmmm. Unfortunately Jack isn’t very good at romance: he can’t read the signs. I love his dopey lips and wide eyes as Shauna presses his hands to her heart. She is excited! She’s excited because although they have avoided death by threshing they’ve just spotted a huge, hunched man with no shoes or socks and a big, bare, hairy back. And I think it’s spotted them. It’s hiding under the bridge like a troll.

Jack forbids Shauna to tell Lottie and Mildred but “Sisters before Misters”, right?

Meanwhile at school Linton and Sonny have acquired a substitute for Jack in the form of Irish lad Colm who’s more than a wee bit wayward when it comes to “shopping”. So that could get them in trouble: there are such things as security cameras, you know. On the other hand, he’s refreshingly direct and seems to know stuff.

“Now then, lads. That’s your missin’ friend isn’t it, over there with blondie? Don’t worry, you’ve got to let ‘em go so they’ll come back. That’s what my da’ says. Of course, he’s talkin’ about pigeons.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“I believe pigeons are in some way… magnetic?”

Oh, Sonny! Sitting on the grass, all dopey, with a daisy-chain draped over your noggin’!

“Sonny, take that off. Someone will thump the dinner out of you.”

Effortlessly Allison has set up all the elements that will come into play later on as the temperature rises on the burning barns, Tackleford’s fire department blaze into rash action and Lottie’s new obsession with romance leads her to try teaching the troll they’ve been tracking The Art Of Romance. He’s about as good at that as Jack.

You don’t see John doing this because every page is such a glorious distraction both in its body-language beauty (see EXPECTING TO FLY #1 and 2), its cartoon flourishes like Colm’s world cracking when Charlotte snubs his advances, and all the circuitous shenanigans set at school (they have a new, somewhat unorthodox French teacher in Mademoiselle Broussard) and while kicking around town afterwards.

It also boasts the recognition factor for it’s all so astutely observed: sitting down to supper for the first time with a family and encountering alien table manners; the jumbled mess of less technically minded adults’ computers; Lottie and sister Sarah’s push-and-pull, tactile relationship and the sort of cheeky, kind-hearted teasing that can only come from love and trust; teachers and their elbow patches; teachers down the boozer of a Friday night.

Also, I’ve been meaning to mention the petticoat. I don’t think I’ve typed the word “petticoat” before and so seldom see one worn anymore. Credit-hogging, local journalist Erin Jane Winters is wearing one and, as drawn by Allison, its pendulous pleats are ever so pretty.

There are thirty new pages here including a glossary this time written by Lottie herself and that early schoolground landscape is a spacious and spatial joy. Speaking of Lottie, I loved her book of local beasts.

“Jerry the Cyclops
“Fearsome looking but his lack of depth perception and physical fitness mean he is NON-THRETTENING.
“Giant bee
“Does it make giant honey?
“NOT SURE
“Local cyborg
“Not billionaire playboy as suspected, just an idiot with a soldering iron and too much spare time.”

SLH

Buy Bad Machinery vol 3: The Case Of The Simple Soul and read the Page 45 review here

Brass Sun vol 1: The Wheel Of Worlds h/c (£25-00, Rebellion) by Ian Edginton & I.N.J. Culbard…

“Heed not the dissenter! Be not lured from the winding way by their wild abstractions!
“Stay constant!
“Stay steadfast!”

No, not Stan Lee proselytising on avoiding non-superhero comics at all costs, but the followers of The Cog extolling the virtues of being vigilant against the temptations of believing in The Watchmaker. And as the Archimandrite himself is behoved to exhort upon hearing Speaker Eusabius mention such a blasphemous term…

“Speak not that name in these halls! The Cog is, was and always shall be! The Cog was not created by a charlatan prophet! The Cog is creation!”

Maybe, maybe not. It would seem to be a question of faith, misplaced or otherwise… Me, I can’t say I’m a true believer, no matter how hard Stan preaches, but what cannot be disputed is The Cog itself is very real indeed, as yet another epic astronomical introductory sequence by Culbard makes clear. It really is becoming quite the trademark. The world Edginton has created, of a technologically devolving society, living on what seems to be a planet somehow mounted on an impossibly complex mechanical structure bearing, I should add, more than a passing resemblance to watch parts (waiting tensely for divine bolt of lightning to sizzle my private parts), is equally grandiose in concept, magnificently so in fact, both in scope and design. Design… hmm…

The populace at large, though, are almost singularly unaware of their situation. Those who think they know the truth, far fewer in number than the hoi polloi, but of course who have control, are doing their best to avoid dealing with the fact that their world is gradually, year on year, getting colder, with summers shortening and the winters becoming ever more harsh. Almost as though a watch were winding down (air positively crackling now!)…

The one person who does seemingly know the real truth, or at least considerably more than anyone else, a former high official of the church of The Cog, is about to commit a very elaborate form of suicide, both to save his granddaughter from the authorities and also to attempt to absolve himself for a frankly irredeemable sin. That this act will enable his granddaughter Wren to undertake a revelatory journey, both for her and by extension us, is also part of his intentions. Without wishing to spoil anything, it’s perhaps suffice to say The Watchmaker, well, it might not be an entirely abstract concept. But then worlds don’t just make themselves? Or do they?

That was most of my review of just the opening issue after which I added I was hooked! It’s the full line and sinker now after these first six issues as Edginton has astonished me with the truly epic milieu he has plotted out and Culbard has then so sublimely envisioned. By the end of this first arc we have only visited a few of the once heavenly spheres, now mostly in dystopian decline or apocalyptic ruin, as Wren continues her quest to establish why the vast mechanism controlling the various planets seems to be slowly winding down to a state of total heat death. I’m quite sure by the end of the overall story after another two or three arcs, we’ll have had the full galactic tour and maybe even learnt a few of The Watchmaker’s secrets…!

It’s rare to read speculative fiction that is based on such an out-there fantastical premise yet maintains a complete plausibility at all times, though I think the suspension of disbelief is greatly aided by the eccentric cast of zany characters that populate the work. Similarly, rarely do you get such a sense of impending, encroaching all-pervasive apocalyptic doom combined with crackpot, irreverent frippery and frivolous fun, and these contrasts are what make this such an entertaining read. It strikes me as I type this, it’s very Douglas Adams in nature actually this work, which is an extremely difficult trick to pull off, so huge congratulations to Edginton for that.

Culbard meanwhile applies that wonderful mix of character scenes and epic alien landscapes used to such good effect in his four Lovecraft adaptations to give the work a real sense of cinema. Perhaps it’s the lovely larger page size format (and it’s also a very chunky hardback too, I must add, a proper whopper for your £25) but I really noticed reading this how he often mixes those opposites up on the same page or even double-page spread, with the vast landscape or huge action scene that takes up half the space then also providing the background three or four story driving panels sit on top of. Not a square millimetre of page wasted on gutters. It’s a great little compositional trick that adds to the sense of scale and grandeur and, again, that cinematic feel. Fantastic to see two truly great British comics creators right at the top of their game.

JR

Buy Brass Sun vol 1: The Wheel Of Worlds h/c and read the Page 45 review here

A Bunch Of Amateurs (£4-99, self-published) by Andrew Waugh.

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is about a bunch of amateurs, each of which turns out to be experts. Experts who have made vital contributions to various sciences.

None of which stops Andrew ‘This Means’ Waugh from having a right old laugh with his imagined scenarios – conversations between these amateur experts and their customers, colleagues or colonels.

Each of the four farces has a different, attractive matt colour palette beginning unsurprisingly with green.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), you see, was an Augustinian friar who not only grew but bred pea plants at his monastery presumably in search of the ultimate pea soup. Here they’ve become so virile they have indeed all but blotted out the sun and monopolised the monasterial gardens to the point where the monk in charge of the kitchens has had nothing else to work with in two whole years. He’s very patient, though. Well, you’d have to be at a monastery, wouldn’t you?

Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) was an Austrian-born actress and star of MGM’s ‘Golden Age’. Together with composer George Antheil, however, she apparently also invented an early form of spread-spectrum communications and frequency hopping which would later pave the way for bluetooth and wi-fi.

Now at this point I was beginning to think we were in Joe Decie’s I BLAME GRANDMA territory in which Joe’s grandmother invented the paperclip. “You couldn’t make this up!” I wrote in my review. Well, I hope you’ve all bought your copies by now.

It transpires that Waugh has made none of this up – apart from the conversations themselves, and this one had me in stitches. It’s Lamarr’s sophistication giving way to an arched eyebrow and exasperation as she pitches her findings to a colonel and a professor, the former chomping on a cigar, the latter puffin on a pipe while Lamarr herself smokes a slim cigarette held like Europeans do at a back-bent angle. It’s also the professor and colonel’s star-struck chauvinism.

“I believe I have something that could greatly benefit the war effort.”
“Indeed. Well, I’ve got to say, you’re already benefiting the room with your presence. Simply ravishing. Am I right, professor?”
“Stunning.”

It gets worse.

“May I continue?”
“Please do.”
“It hasn’t escaped our notice that the country’s torpedoes are a particular risk from signal jamming. All it would take to send one off course would be for the enemy to locate the control signal and broadcast interference at that exact frequency.”
“I’m no scientist, Miss Lamarr but you are undoubtedly broadcasting a signal at this very moment.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re causing interference in my heart.”
“Woof.”

And so it goes.

Mary Anning (1799-1847) is a plump cheeked palaeontologist in a bonnet, selling her wares on a table by some sand dunes. She did comb the cliffs at Lyme Regis and flogged her fossil findings to punters like this posho who takes her for a simpleton so seeks to take her for a ride. I think you’ll find it’s yourself in the passenger seat, matey.

Finally we have Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Him, you may have heard of. What you might not know, however, is that – following little formal education – he was self-taught during his seven-year stint as a bookseller apprentice.

This one put me in mind of YOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK’s Tom Gauld. It’s probably all the books. It’s also another posho punter being inbred, aristocratically stupid as Faraday pops up from behind his test tubes like in Watch With Mother’s Mr. Benn. You know, “And suddenly the shop keeper appeared.”

“Good day, sir. How may I help you?”
“Ah, there you are. Yes, I’m interested in buying one of these new-fangled “books” I’ve heard so much about. Do you have any?”
“One or two, sir.”

Perfect panel, that.

Actually that exchange sounds delightfully familiar.

SLH

Buy A Bunch Of Amateurs and read the Page 45 review here

The Walking Man h/c (£14-99, Fanfare – Ponent Mon) by Jiro Taniguchi.

Do you go walking?

Every time I cross the River Trent on my way to work, something magical happens. I can’t explain it, but it makes all the difference: a sensation of space and light and beauty heightened several-fold when I cross it on foot. Eye-candy. We all need eye-candy.

And that’s the simple premise behind this book: one man, sometimes with the dog his wife found under their house, takes eighteen different walks round the Japanese suburbs and occasionally out into the countryside.

It’s clean and it’s beautiful and the word that keeps springing to mind is indeed ‘magical’. The amount of work that has gone into some of these landscapes is staggering: line after delicate line tracing the structure of trees, roofs and fencing.

A quiet book of exploration which will cure any brief bout of the blues.

10th Anniversary hardcover reprint.

SLH

Buy The Walking Man h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Cochlea & Eustachia s/c (£14-99, Fantagraphics) by Hans Rickheit…

More mind-rending material from the obscurist’s obscurist, Hans Rickheit. If, like me, you still can’t unsee in your mind’s eye the huge pipe organ constructed from pig’s heads from THE SQUIRREL MACHINE, or perhaps are still nervously trembling in anticipation of what unimaginable monstrosity might lie behind the next door, in his anthology of oddity FOLLY, THE CONSEQUENCES OF INDISCRETION, you’ll know precisely what to expect from this extended collection of material featuring possibly the strangest pair of identical twin sisters you’re ever likely to meet. I’m not sure if trouble is their middle name, but it probably should be as they have a natural affinity for getting into improbably grim scrapes akin to Santa Claus getting his arse wedged, chestnuts-a-roasting, over yet another open fire.

So it proves here as they wake up yet again in someone else’s rather disturbing abode, sparsely yet sinisterly decorated with surreal objets de rather terrifying art, most of which seem as though they might be stuffed / pickled trophies or implements to facilitate inconceivable and possibly anatomically impossible torture techniques. Someone who seems to be half-mole, half-man, and whose residence / laboratory is set in a vast field of birds’ skulls… I sense trouble! If Hans should ever offer to interior-design my house or landscape the gardens, I can assure you I’ll be politely but firmly refusing…

Meanwhile, at first the girls are content to secretly observe the moleman, scrambling along the rafters, but once they spot what seems to be an identical triplicate of themselves, also creeping around the house, it’s not long before they’re discovered and the peril factor starts to ramp up exponentially. As I have mentioned whilst reviewing his works before, the closest analogy I can make in modern comics to Hans’ material would be Charles Burns’ X’ED OUT / THE HIVE / SUGAR SKULL trilogy. This is even weirder, though, trust me.

JR

Buy Cochlea & Eustachia s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Sam Jamwitch And The Sad Wooden Ferrets; Sam Jamwitch And The Snoozle Pigs (£2-50 each) by Kate Hazell, Ed Hawkesworth >

Sam Jamwitch is a witch made of jam living in a house of toast with her aptly named familiar, Pectin (heh).

In episode one Sam and Pectin go into the woods to collect logs so that they can keep their toast house toasty warm. It is here that they come across the wooden ferrets, who are blubbering because of Sam chopping down the trees. Wanting to be a nice witch, Sam invites them home for a cuppa and crumpets to cheer them up. The wooden ferrets, however, are less than grateful and make a thorough nuisance of themselves, and they should certainly know better than to annoy a witch. It is here that we are exposed to the wonderfully dark humour of Kate and Ed and oh, how perfectly done it is!

It’s playful and naive illustration style perfectly complements the weird and whimsical world in with Sam and Pectin reside. Full of puns and with humour that is thoroughly British, I think that Sam Jamwitch is a bit of a gem.

In episode two Sam is after some Angry Acorns that “keep you at boiling point, maintain a livid complexion, and bitter aftertaste”; the perfect product for a witch finding herself a bit on the soft side these days. For the prestigious job of foraging for the Angry Acorns, Sam employs the Snoozle Pigs. With a nickname like that you would think that the inevitable is obvious, but apparently not to Sam. Oh, Sam. Maybe you won’t need those angry acorns after all.

Once again filled with silliness, puns, and dark humour; this is an enjoyable little treat that’s great for a chuckle.

JP

Buy Sam Jamwitch And The Sad Wooden Ferrets and read the Page 45 review here

Buy Sam Jamwitch And The Snoozle Pigs and read the Page 45 review here

The Shadow Hero (£12-99, First Second) by Gene Luen Yang & Sonny Liew…

“NO NO NO!”
“But you don’t even know what a superhero is!”
“Of course I know what a superhero is! They are all over the newspapers!”
“Then why don’t you want to be one!”

Haha, pushy mothers, exactly the same the world over since time immemorial, though perhaps Hank’s mother might have her sights set slightly higher than most. Two Page 45 favourites, Gene Luen AMERICAN BORN CHINESE Yang and Sonny MALINKY ROBOT Liew, combine to tell the tale of the first Asian American superhero The Green Turtle, but it’s an affectionate spoof of American immigrant culture as much as a homage to this little known comics character.

Hank’s mother was always determined her son would amount to more than her worthless – in her eyes – husband, in reality a hard-working family man running a grocery business, harbouring a strange, mystical secret. Before arriving in the US, Hank’s father liked a drink, well quite a few, and whilst in a drunken stupor that ended up with him on a steamer ship to the new world, he made a pact with a powerful spirit force looking to escape the rapidly changing, chaotic world of early 20th Century China. America, the land of opportunity beckoned, but needing a human host to get there it made a deal to grant Hank’s father one wish in exchange for passage.

 

 

I do like a bit of comedy superheroes when it’s done well. Gene Yang plays up the Chinese cultural tropes you would expect to great effect, both in terms of family and the wider potted history of Asian / American superheroes (and villains!), whilst Sonny Liew knows how to work facial features for the maximum humorous effect, that is for sure. Hank’s pained expressions at his mother’s latest crazy attempts to lure him into the world of do-gooding are a joy to behold. Expressions he’s desperate for his mother not to see of course, for whilst the pain of getting yet another battering by the thugs of Chinatown is weighing heavily on his mind, letting his dear mother down would be far, far worse of course!

JR

Buy The Shadow Hero and read the Page 45 review here

The Royals – Masters Of War s/c (£10-99, Vertigo) by Rob Williams & Simon Coleby.

Full-blooded art with some seriously fine architecture, most of it on fire or in ruins during this blue-blooded, Second World War, superhuman showdown.

Initially it’s the riff-raff on the receiving end but this gets bigger and bigger and nastier and nastier, sending you down some very dark and unexpected alleys. I don’t think comparisons with ZENITH Phase One are uncalled for: not just for the WWII setting and the superhumanity, but for the politics as well.

One of the many elements that intrigued and impressed me no end was how Williams incorporated so many historically recorded events so inextricably within the story he wanted to tell – how at times they even propel it – even if their execution and outcome necessarily prove different. The handling of Pearl Harbour in particular struck me as trenchantly observed when it came to the Japanese psyche. I should probably stop there before I give too much away.

London 1940, then, and the problem for young Prince Henry is that not only are his subjects on the receiving end, but they’re the ones doing all the fighting while his father, King Albert, holds lavish court in Buckingham Palace and his older brother gets pissed in the pantry with his trousers round his ankles.

Moreover, Britain is losing. London is being bombed to buggery in the Blitz while the RAF is painfully outnumbered and outgunned by the German Luftwaffe. The threat of an imminent Nazi invasion is all too real.

Royal Secret Intelligence Service liaison, Lt. Colonel Lockhart, isn’t exactly happy about the state of affairs, either, nor the affairs of the State. He’s sickened by the champagne-guzzling elite so far from the front line, and he’s all too easily goaded by the dissolute Prince Arthur.

“May I ask your Highness, why you do not enter the fight yourself?”

“Well… I’d have thought that was blindingly obvious, Lt. Colonel, even to a man of your blatant lack of breeding. But I’ll happily spell it out for you. I am a Prince. My life is extraordinarily enjoyable, and the gullible proles shoot their little guns and get blown to bits on my behalf. It’s a quite marvellous social system.”

So what’s new?

What’s new is this: the royal families of Europe have long enjoyed not only the Divine Right of Kings – the unquestionable and inalienable right to rule – but also supposedly God-given preternatural powers. Naturally they didn’t want to share them, hence all the inbreeding. However, after a little revolution or two in France and Russia – and King Albert being a genetic aberration, born powerless – the King decided to protect his children from jealous Bolshies by pretending his children were born without powers too. They weren’t. Princess Rose was born telepathic (something which drove her own mother mad), Prince Henry was born with the power of strength, flight and a certain degree of invulnerability, and Prince Arthur was born with the ability to piss everyone off within a fifty-mile radius.

Oh yes, Rose and Henry were born with something else which no royal family in Europe had been in possession of since records began: a social conscience. So late that same night, little more than an hour after the last German plane had dropped its incendiary load, they sneak out of the palace grounds, Rose cupped in Henry’s arms as they fly high above London, looking down on its black-out monuments. They are sharing a moment.

“It’s like Peter Pan.”

But as they descend past the dirigibles suspended in the evening sky, they see they are lit from the below, and what lies below is a holocaust of burning buildings, burning bodies and wailing orphans lost and alone in the blistering inferno.

“No, it’s not.”

Of Simon Coleby’s multiple stunning sequences and set pieces – including the prologue set in Berlin four years later; a titanic, oceanic confrontation; a jaw-dropping piece of perspective for the penultimate chapter’s cliffhanger and every single subsequent twenty-two pages – this held the most power for me: beautifully controlled one either side by both creators (JUDGE DREDD: TRIFECTA) but, in its molten core, coloured by JD Mettler so that you can feel the unbearable heat and hear the crackling corpses, it’s absolutely harrowing. Cut immediately to a morning shortly thereafter and the next German squadron making yet another of their relentless, remorseless approaches on the London skyline have more than they bargained for ahead of them: dozens and dozens of British fighter planes and a very angry, free-flying Prince Henry. He is not wearing royal livery, no, nor an officer’s uniform, but rank-and-file, khaki, rolled up sleeves, braces and brown tie. Nice.

It’s all quite angrily written, and I like that.

The early history lesson was far from perfunctory exposition but enjoyable in its own right (not a second of this is overwritten) and, in tandem with the ominous prologue, the cliffhanger is quite the ellipsis. Prince Henry has his day in the sun, all right, blasting through German bombers and returning one giant burning fuselage, held aloft, to a crowd cheering round the Victoria Monument with its angel of victory (again, great shot, Simon) but we already know by that point what will happen in 1945 and King Albert is reading The Telegraph headline with dismay.

His scheme had been far from unilateral, you see. He had made an international pact.

“Henry, you utter bloody idiot. Do you really think that we’re the only royal family with power?”

Nothing I have written here will prepare you for the brutality of what ensues or Rob Williams’ closely kept curve-balls; indeed I have compounded his own misdirection at least once above.

I did that with a review last week in a sentence which gave me inordinate pleasure, but only to enhance yours when you get to that comic’s punchline.

SLH

Buy The Royals – Masters Of War s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Zenith Phase Two h/c (£20-00, Rebellion) by Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell.

In its time, so contemporary. Twenty-five years on and it’s still so relevant that it appears positively prescient.

There was one particular boy-band manager who was notoriously gay. And not just notorious for being gay – for being casting-couch gay. Pop star Zenith’s manager Eddie MacPhail is much less predatory but he seems to have annoyed U.S. Intelligence’s Phaedra Cale.

“Okay! I’ve had enough of this ‘Monty Python’ stuff! Zenith’s coming with me and I will not be dictated to by some old Scotch fairy!”
“Excuse me!”

Indignation.

“It’s Scots, if you don’t mind. ’Scotch’ is a drink!”

Well played, that man, Morrison!

Powers, politics and some of the slickest superhero art of all time. Reprinted here, it’s so glossy it glows. I used to dream that my hair was drawn by Steve Yeowell. And – to be fair – my hair at the time did look as if it had been drawn by Steve Yeowell. I spent an hour each day making sure of that.

ZENITH Phase One was a beauty to behold but here Yeowell really takes flight, loosening up from what I presume was a John Byrne fetish to become its own flexible thing. My presumptions come from a couple of the poses and the reflective circles of light in young Robert’s eyes. My preference for Yeowell stems from his infinitely keener, contemporary fashion sense and a line which is looser, more humane.

You know how some people wonder which actor they’d like to portray their biopic on screen? I think of that in terms of comicbook artists: I’d like Steve Yeowell to depict me.

Okay, for the set-up, please ZENITH Phase One.

Robert is a pop star whose sales largely centre around him having superhuman powers and a bloody great quiff. He’s not a superhero, mind. He’s not in the hero business at all. He’s all about those singles’ sales so when called on to help out he needs some persuading. Here’s a particularly effective lure: the truth of what happened to his parents.

Zenith is the first pure-bred superhero, resulting from his birth from two others: he’s ingested none of the metamorphic drugs designed to create superhumans from scratch. He is unique. And targeted. And he’s about to meet Daddy.

Meanwhile Richard Branson has set up shop and is about to unleash the most monumental assault on Britain’s sovereign soil on record. Did I say Richard Branson…? It must be the balloon sweaters. I meant Scott Wallace, obviously. Nobody sue me, now.

Includes some of Morrison’s ecological arguments which would manifest themselves far more extensively in ANIMAL MAN and WE3, both recommended.

SLH

Buy Zenith: Phase Two h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Complete D.R. & Quinch (£11-99, Rebellion) by Alan Moore, Jamie Delano, Alan Davis & Alan Moore.

Back in 2001 we used to print Recommended Reading Lists which weren’t really lists at all.

But even at their longest they were “mere” 24-page brochures which Mark had enormous fun illustrating with flair, so space was limited and reviews were necessarily condensed from our mailshots or at least succinct.

I once summarised ENIGMA as “Contains a great many lizards and a closet.”

DEATH I described thus: “She’s funny, she’s sweet, she’s gorgeous and gothic. She’s enormously kind and very good company – as you’ll find out for yourself one day.” I pretty much left it like that. Of this Mark wrote in 2001:

“Only last month the latest revamp of the Judge Dredd Megazine had the first couple of stories of the delinquent duo and it still made me laff. A lot seems to have been cribbed from the Hitchhikers Guide but it’s worth the price of admission for the reduced James Dean does Shakespeare skit. Now could someone reprint Moore’s BOJEFFRIES SAGA?”

And they finally have, with a brand-new chapter!

“A suburban sitcom with a Chas Addams twist.”

Ah, I’ve just got it!

SLH

Buy The Complete D.R. & Quinch and read the Page 45 review here

Superman: Unchained Deluxe Edition h/c (£22-50, DC) by Scott Snyder & Jim Lee…

Of the first issue, I wrote…

Easy to see why DC have let Scott Snyder loose on Big Blue as his extremely popular, and more importantly excellent, run on BATMAN continues unabated. Whether he can replicate that success on what is a rather more… one-dimensional character (and indeed supporting characters – I really am tired of seeing Lois Lane written as highly strung and career-obsessed, Perry as the gruff editor with a heart of gold, and not forgetting comedy relief and donut delivery boy Jimmy Olsen) remains to be seen, but we’re off to a good start here, even if Lois is full-on multi-tasking mode, Perry yelling at all and sundry to meet deadlines and Jimmy off on a donut run…

Okay, secondary characters aside, I did really enjoy this. It’s an interesting enough set-up with multiple satellites falling from the sky, possibly at the behest of Lex Luthor, currently en route to a super-max prison facility, though he does find time to make a brief show-stealing cameo, showing he has nerves of steel, if not the skin to match. And of course, only Superman can catch them all and save the day, except it seems one additional satellite was stopped from falling… But if Superman didn’t do it, nor following his initial investigations any member of the Justice League or other heroes, then who did? Our glimpsed answer, privy only to us fourth-wall breakers (if not Source Wall – sorry crap DC in-joke), shows that Snyder has already got a potential belter of story arc up his sleeve. Promising…

What of the art then? Well, I must say, since Jim Lee’s relatively recent return to DC and subsequent current run on JUSTICE LEAGUE, written by Geoff Johns, I have been reminded just how good his art can be, when he’s actually illustrating something I’m bothered about reading – like ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN – which always helps. Also, this issue features a crazy fold-out page right inside the front cover which gets things off with a bang. It doesn’t entirely work in that once you’ve folded it out, you realise it’s a double page spread on reverse sides of the huge page. I have to admit I did grab a second copy just so I could see what it looked like together in all its glory and who knows, maybe that’s what DC are intending, for everyone to buy two copies, precisely for that reason. Can’t quite imagine how on earth it’s going to work in the trade either, but anyway, it’s a nice touch.

[Editor’s note: we haven’t checked!]

JR

Buy Superman: Unchained Deluxe Edition h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire vol 1 (£8-99, Viz) by Naoki Serizawa…

“If word of their condition got out, the students would have been terrified. I merely did what was necessary to avoid panic. All I need you to do now is find the source of the virus.”

I have commented a fair few times on the Japanese proclivity for basing manga at high schools, not matter what the genre of material, and now you can add official ‘dramatic horror’ video game prequel to that list, for this story arc is intended to act as a lead-in to Resident Evil 6. It’s not remotely connected in any important way I can see other than it shoe-horns various characters from that title in. I long since ceased playing the franchise so I merely read it from a comics perspective and actually it’s rather good.

In terms of both the relentless action and imminent-peril storyline provided by that ever-winning combination of big guns and even bigger monsters (and also the art), I was somewhat minded of GANTZ. Probably one purely for fans of the games, but if a publisher is going to do a spin-off / tie-in, it’s nice to see them make sure it is actually of decent quality.

JR

Buy Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews as reviews. Neat, huh?

Saga vol 4 (£10-99, Image) by Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples

Thief Of Thieves vol 4: The Hit List (£10-99, Image) by Andy Diggle & Shawn Martinborough

7 String vol 2 (£9-99, ) by Nich Angell

Angel & Faith Season 10 vol 1: Where The River Meets The Sea (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Victor Gischler & Will Conrad,  Derlis Santacruz

Lobster Johnson vol 4: Get The Lobster! (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Tonci Zonjic

Second Avenue Caper (£10-50, Hill & Wang) by Joyce Brabner & Mark Zingarelli

Sonic Select vol 6 (£8-99, Archie) by various

Batgirl vol 4: Wanted s/c (£12-99, DC) by Gail Simone & Fernando Parsarin, Daniel Sampere, Jonathan Glapion

Batgirl vol 5: Deadline h/c (£18-99, DC) by Gail Simone, Marguerite Bennett & Fernando Parsarin, Jonathan Glapion, various

Batman And Robin vol 5: The Big Burn h/c (£18-99, DC) by Peter J. Tomasi & Patrick Gleason, Doug Mahnke, Mick Gray, various

Swamp Thing vol 5: The Killing Field s/c (£10-99, DC) by Charles Soule & Jesus Saiz, Javier Pina, Andrei Bressan

The Authority vol 2 s/c (£18-99, DC) by Mark Millar, various & Frank Quitely, various

All New X-Men vol 4: All-Different s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Stuart Immonen, Brandon Peterson

Daredevil vol 7 s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Mark Waid & Chris Samnee, Jason Copland, Javier Rodriguez

Silver Surfer vol 1: New Dawn (UK Edition) s/c (£10-99, Marvel) by Dan Slott & Mike Allred

Uncanny X-Force: Rick Remender Complete Collection vol 2 s/c (£25-99, Marvel) by Rick Remender & Jerome Opena, Billy Tan, Greg Tocchini, Phil Noto, Mike McKone, Julian Totino Tedesco, Dave Williams

Powers Bureau vol 2 (£14-99, Icon) by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming

Assassination Classroom vol 1 (£6-99, Viz) by Yusei Matsui

Dorohedero vol 14 (£9-99, Viz) by Q Hayashida

Mobile Suit Gundam Origin vol 8: The Origin (£22-50, Vertical) by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Spice & Wolf vol 10 (£9-99, Yen) by Isuna Hasekura & Keito Koume

News!

ITEM! Ooooooh, look! Saga vol 4 is in! Merry Christmas to us all! Ker-Ching!

Also, this!

– Stephen

Page 45 Reviews December 2014 week two

Wednesday, December 10th, 2014

The two creators communicate; they are on the same page: what Gillen does in his scene-setting envelope is reflected by Bennett in her epistle within.

 – Stephen on Angela #1 by Gillen, Bennet & Jimenez, Hans

Here h/c (£25-00, Hamish Hamilton) by Richard McGuire.

1932: “I lost my wallet.”
1923: “I must have left the umbrella somewhere.”
2008: “I think I’m losing my mind.”

500,000 BC: You are currently on the coast. Tectonic plates will need to shift somewhat before that house even gets built.

Absolutely extraordinary.

I have never seen anything like this in my life

Six pages of this were originally published in Spiegelman’s RAW back in 1989. Thirty-five years later: here, have 200+ pages of something so current it could even be Chris Ware.

Every single shot on every single double-page spread takes place from the same vantage point: the corner of one particular room. The camera angle moves not once. However, there are two things to bear in mind:

1) That house has not always stood there.

2) Different things happen in different parts of that room during different periods of time. How interesting would it be to marry those events in separate panels on the same double-page spread?

I think this is one of those “Seeing is believing” books which I may have to show you on the shop floor. It’s a bit like Ray Fawkes’ equally inventive ONE SOUL and THE PEOPLE INSIDE in that respect.

The story weaves backwards and forwards in time as the various inhabitants move in, move out, take family photographs, grow up, grow old or break down. Exterior shots (remember, that house has not always stood there) are startling and rendered in rough-hewn pencil, wash or colour flats. Same goes for the inhabitants whether inside or out. But the interior shots of the room itself are all very much matt, colour flats with only the ever-changing wallpaper boasting any patterned line. It’s beautiful – absolutely exquisite.

‘Life’ and ‘Time’ magazines lie side by side on one tableau’s coffee table which seems – in this context – a very funny joke to me.

Exchanges or reflections may sound familiar:

“You find yourself singing a song…
“Then you realise the lyrics are the perfect commentary on your thoughts. Your subconscious has selected them like a jukebox.”

That happened to me the other day with Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson’s ‘In My Secret Life’ – which I guess is no longer so secret.

A lit fireplace at night in 1955 stood out as surprising, snug and warm; especially since in the inset 1986 panel a couple look coldly away from each other. I don’t suppose they lasted long there.

One page is given over to the multitude of insults thrown over the years.

I cannot be sure what is happening in 1777 but I have some very nasty suspicions.

Highly commended then, with all my soul: this is a graphic novel which will really make you reflect.

P.S. Dear publisher: comics is a medium, not a genre.

SLH

Buy Here h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Shaolin Cowboy s/c (£14-99, Burlyman) by Geof Darrow.

“How charmingly Asian of you…
“And without the aid of wires.”

Honey, you have never seen a kung-fu flick with such slick choreography, frozen-framed here for detailed analysis as only a comic can do!

Even the noble and nimble Jackie Chan would bow to Geoff (one ‘f’) Darrow’s superiority as nigh-on a hundred vengeful varmints queue behind King Crab, a somewhat self-involved crustacean whose entire family and prospective wife were gorged on by the Shaolin Cowboy in search of a sea-food platter. I can assure you these revengers will be disassembled in no uncertain terms, and will learn the true meaning of the term gut-punch.

First, though, they stand in line… after line… after line… in a sequence of double-page spreads so deliciously self-indulgent – so hilariously inexhaustible all the way to the fly-clouded portable loo – that you cannot help but cackle. This is the artist, remember, who rendered Frank Miller’s HARD BOILED in its all its gore-strewn glory and his detail exceeds even the great George Pérez. Pore over the Alton-Towers-scale queue with its cats, parakeets and monkeys, its tattoos, handcuffs and (warning) cock rings! It demands that you do so.

 

This is a man relishing his craft, drawing for the sheer joy of it. The landscapes are epic with gigantic geological outcrops, while the skies coloured predominantly by Peter Doherty are a lambent, pollution-free blue.

Then when those geological features start moving… What? Take a look at the back cover hinted at on its front! Those are quite specific rock formations, aren’t they? There’s a scene here I feel sure inspired another in Brandon Graham’s MULTIPLE WARHEADS.

Like Beat Takeshi, The Shaolin Cowboy himself is a man of few words, leaving those for his sun-visored, hip-hop-hating horse who has quite the thing for Robert Mitchum. The script is packed with political and cultural satire but remains light, bright and breezy. It’s all about the acrobatics instead.

SLH

Buy The Shaolin Cowboy s/c and read the Page 45 review here

I Blame Grandma (£4-99, self-published) by Joe Decie.

God bless The Deech: all our copies are signed and sketched-in!

I love everything about Joe THE LISTENING AGENT Decie: his mischief, his timing, his otherwise mundane household objects… even his handwriting.

Yes, his handwriting! It’s one of the most attractive in comics: capital letters, far from rigid, that dance up and down while remaining as crystal clear as the layout here. (Although now THE END’s Dan Berry’s going to tell me it’s one of the many fonts he’s created.)

Speaking of Dan Berry, like his own NICHOLAS & EDITH this is another of seven 24 Hour Comics he orchestrated at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival. I can’t imagine the pressure but it doesn’t look like Joe felt any.

This is as effortlessly entertaining as ever, about how his gran invented the paper clip, fashioning it from fuse wire while working as a clerk in Sir Gerald Patten’s War Office around 1940. So that’s several household objects on the very first page. Our Joe draws a perfect pair of pliers, you know.

 

I always wonder about who invented everyday objects and why: it’s usually necessity popping out another sprog, isn’t it? In this case Joe’s grandma felt the need to file faster and keep what she filed better organised. The paperclip quickly catches on and before you know it she’s given her own office to set to it in the reappropriated Malvern Road Tube Station.

“Apparently it was mostly used for anti aircraft operations, but Gran had her own bit, separate with its own lift!
“From her room she has direct access to the station.
“She said she used to eat her sandwiches down there. In the dark.”

You couldn’t make this up, could you?

Anyway, fast-forward to the present day and there are repercussions. Well, you have to think of the patent and all that implies. I’m not going to give the game away, but there’s a big chunk of Joe’s life here I knew nothing about and next time I bump into him I’m going to quiz him quite chronically. Fascinating!

I will just say she that his gran was given a St Hubbins Cross medal and – typically – kept it in a tin of boot polish. An empty one, obviously. Well, empty apart from the medal. Joe draws a mean tin of boot polish too!

SLH

Buy I Blame Grandma and read the Page 45 review here

Hansel & Gretel h/c (£12-99, Bloomsbury) by Neil Gaiman, The Brothers Grimm & Lorenzo Mattotti.

The drawings came first.

They are eerie, awful things, crawling with shadows, swirling in darkness, with the thickest of tree-trunks blotting out the sky.

Stark, dark and black with just a glimpse of white light, they are cold and claustrophobic, evoking all the bleakness of a land ravaged by soldiers to the point of being all but barren, bringing those few inhabitants left to the brink of starvation.

That is why the mother persuades the father to drag their children the ancient forest to be left to fend for themselves. Yes, “drag”, the second time; just look at the angle of Mattotti’s three figures!

“Nobody said anything about killing anybody. We’ll take them deep into the forest, and lose them.”

“We” won’t do anything. She will make him do that.

“They will be fine. Perhaps a kind person will take them in, and feed them. And we can always have more children,” she added, practically.
“A bear might eat them,” said the woodcutter, dejectedly. “We cannot do this thing.”
“If you do not eat,” said the wife, “then you will not be able to swing an axe. And if you cannot cut down a tree, or haul wood into the town, then we all starve and die. Two dead are better than four dead. That is mathematics, and it is logic.”

Terribly, Hansel’s stomach is so cramped with hunger he cannot sleep and overhears that entire conversation.

I’ve read many versions of this tale which the Brothers Grimm themselves tinkered with in different editions; none evoked quite this same sense of physical starvation or moral malnutrition. I’ve found almost all illustrations running contrary to the contents with their colour and candysticks. Here the old woman’s domestic lure looks more like some occidental pagoda, its furnace primed for human flesh raging in the darkness.

Not an ideal Christmas present, I grant you, but highly recommended all the same.

Illustrated prose BTW.

SLH

Buy and read the Page 45 review here

The Cats Of Tanglewood Forest s/c (£5-99, Little Brown) by Charles De Lint & Charles Vess –

Not comics (I repeat, not comics!) but prose with a healthy dose of illustration from the utterly lovely Charles Vess. Good god but do I want to live in a forest drawn by Charles Vess! The shade is cool, the leaves are damp and the tree bark is rough and warm. I do wish he did more sequential stuff but if I am to get my Vess fix through beautifully crafted children’s stories like these then I really won’t complain.

The story is of a likeable, kindly, headstrong girl who lives on her Aunt’s farm and loves to explore the woods around her home. Mostly she is looking for Faeries and magic; she’s sure there must be some about but she can never seem to find it. But when an accident occurs she is drawn into that magic; a magic which has existed all around her for her entire life but which she is only now becoming aware of. So begins the journey with all the trials, lessons and lucky escapes you’d expect from a fantasy adventure such as this.

While the story is very well written, engaging and very sweet in places it is the art which really made this book stick in my head.

 

Back in the day I had a conversation with the late great Mark Simpson (one half of the genius behind Page 45) about the books which informed our aesthetic. Picture books from very early childhood that we were barely able to remember but which had imprinted on our brains, shaping our idea of beauty before we were even really conscious of what beauty was. He showed me a book his parents had uncovered in storage somewhere; it was full of painted pictures of animals and immediately you could see where some of the colours and shapes he preferred in his own art came from. I feel similarly when I see Charles Vess’ art: there is something about the foliage and the trees which just takes me somewhere *else*. It’s beyond dreamy, utterly gorgeous.

I would have devoured this book as a child and so I have been recommending it to parents in the shop left right and centre! But I also enjoyed it as an adult, not just for the marvellous illustrations but for the rich sense of place the writing created. A lovely, lovely book.

DK

Buy and read the Page 45 review here

Andre The Giant: Life And Legend (£12-99, First Second) by Box Brown…

“We are unusual men
Though we walk with you
We don’t think like you
We are not like you
We see with unusual eyes
We have unusual minds
We wear one-piece suits
We are not you.”

Song lyrics from We Are Unusual Men, taken from Nine And A Half Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s & Early 1980s by Luke Haines.

Wrestling. For people of a certain generation like myself, Saturday morning television consisted of Tiswas and repeats of the classic Adam West Batman, but Saturday afternoon, well, there was only one thing you wanted to watch during the Dickie-Davies-presented World Of Sport marathon, and that was the wrestling. It’s hard to comprehend now, the cultural sway this pastime held over vast swathes of the nation, young and old alike, at the time. With colourful characters like Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Rollerball Rocco and Kendo Nagasaki, it was a glimpse into a strange world of feuds, grudges and vendettas, that could only be settled honourably, or with a bit of judicious bending of the rules, inside the ring. The villains like Rocco always tried to cheat, mind you, but ninety percent or so of the time, the good guys would win out. And if not, well, there was always the inevitable rematch to settle the score.

Of course, we all believed it was completely real… Everyone – sensible, right minded adults, not just the kids – truly believed that someone could actually survive an Atomic Splash whereby a thirty-stone plus man would just drop his full bodily weight directly upon you whilst you were lying prone upon the ground.

Then, someone, the Daily Mail I think (always the Daily Mail…) ran a huge exposé proving it was all a big act, that the matches were in fact fixed, the opponents <gasp> colluding with each other, and somehow it just all seemed somewhat tawdry after that. Actually, I think the nation’s youth became ensconced in the rather more stimulating delights of the ZX Spectrum 48K, Commodore 64, BBC Microcomputer et al, but that’s a different story. But, coinciding with it disappearing off television in some sort of rights dispute, well, it gradually drifted from the UK public consciousness entirely.

Meanwhile though, across the pond, the burgeoning US wrestling scene managed to somehow make the transition from illegitimate sporting event to legitimate entertainment spectacle and remain in the forefront of television programming. One of the main reasons for this was undoubtedly the man mountain known as Andre The Giant. I had vaguely heard of him, simply because I was aware that the boxer versus wrestler match between Rocky Balboa and Thunderlips (played by Hulk Hogan who until the Rock came along in latter years was probably the best known US wrestler in the UK simply by dint of this cameo) in Rocky 3 was based on just such a miss-matchup between Andre and a hapless stooge of a pugilist.

This, then, is the story of one of the most colourful characters in US wrestling history. Born in rural France with a genetic disorder that resulted in his freakish large stature at even an extremely young age, and ultimately led to his premature death, Andre was always marked out as different. Thus when the opportunity to take the road less travelled into the grappling business presented itself, he quite literally seized it with both hands. Box Brown presents a fascinating tale of a complex character, who knew he was doomed to live a shorter life than most, and perhaps thus decided it needed to be lived to the full. You can’t say Andre was entirely a good man, he certainly had his demons and darker side, which came more to the fore particularly towards the end of his life, but he was always entertaining.

Whilst you might not be familiar with Andre, if like myself you think wistfully of the days of Kendo Nagasaki bashing Catweasel’s brains in on the corner stanchion before tagging his tag team partner in to complete the demolition job, you’ll get a flying dropkick out of seeing what was going at a comparable time on the other side of the Atlantic. Even without any great love of grappling it’s a splendid biography of a world inhabited by, as Luke Haines would put it, unusual men, with unusual minds, who wear one-piece suits, and are not like you. Unless you’re into cosplay that is I suppose…

It just goes to show how a biography written by a man with a passion for his topic is always going to engage the reader. Wonderfully illustrated, it really captures the incessant energy and rollercoaster emotions present throughout Andre’s eventful life, from an early encounter as a youth with Samuel Beckett who encouraged him to spread his wings and live his dreams, through to the difficult days towards the end, when prolific drinking was his only solace from the extreme pain of his condition.

 

Box clearly has the sort of fondness for wrestling from this era that I do, and I seriously wonder if could interest him in doing a graphic biography on that most mysterious man of all, Kendo Nagasaki? I can still recall my jaw dropping during his ceremonial unmasking performed in front of literally millions of people on television, with his manager Gorgeous George dressed in some spangly garb more befitting a glam rock star, the two robed acolytes falling prostrate upon the canvas whilst Nagasaki plunged his samurai sword into the centre of the ring, before his mask was removed to reveal a rather striking man with a part shaven head, plaited pony tail and mystic symbol tattooed on the top of his head. Pure theatre, quite incredible stuff, and if you would like to see it for yourself, check it out HERE, because someone has managed to get hold of the original World Of Sport broadcast and get it up on Youtube! These days Kendo holds Buddhist retreats at his Wolverhampton mansion, claims to have remote healing powers, and errr… drives a banana yellow Lamborghini Countach… A most unusual man…

JR

Buy Andre The Giant: Life And Legend and read the Page 45 review here

Crossed Plus One Hundred #1 (£2-99, Avatar) by Alan Moore & Gabriel Andrade.

One hundred years have passed since The Surprise.

And it was quite a surprise, let me tell you. You’d be quite surprised if you found yourself in Nottingham city centre and it was suddenly writhing in howling, bellowing, jabbering hoards of half-clad cretins, urinating in doorways and leering lasciviously at anyone who passed by.

Outside of a Saturday night, anyway.

Yet that’s what has happened in CROSSED, kicked off by Garth Ennis a dozen or so volumes ago: a worldwide pandemic of sexually insatiable savages in which no one – no matter how old or young or how closely related – was safe. “This is what the worst of humanity looks like uninhibited by law” is what Garth seemed to say; and you look at some geographical regimes and cannot help but agree.

I enjoyed the first book, if “enjoyed” is the right word. I was actually vicariously terrified, peering through my fingers as I tentatively turned the pages – which isn’t easy using only your elbows. I initially promoted the series thus:

“Whatever your most terrifying nightmare, this is infinitely worse.”

After that, I’m afraid it lost me. The genuine, stomach-churning tension which made me invest emotionally in each individual or shudder at their complete callousness and disregard for their fellow fugitive was replaced by such grotesquery that it repelled me with its not-necessary nastiness and so from what was occurring. Jonathan assured me that its spin-off series CROSSED: WISH YOU WERE HERE by Si Spurrier was a huge return to form but I haven’t been sufficiently intrigued until the words “Alan” and “Moore” lured me back, and look: he’s brought a rather fine artist with him.

The textures on this detritus-strewn landscape are as rich as its detail: there’s so much to look at surrounding the more obvious focal points of the plot: the libraries, churches and the rusted stream train carrying this cast of archivists across a much more thinly populated wilderness where you can almost hear the silence.

It seems there are now far fewer nests of The Crossed (so-called because of the cross of red blisters which erupts across their faces on infection like some pustular St George’s flag), largely because they’ve eaten their own children before they’re old enough to breed. So it’s relatively (relatively) safe to venture a little further from the tracks to see what can be gleaned from what’s left of the relics of their past to better understand what used to be considered their culture. Although everyone goes armed with a shotgun.

Just as well, because one such expedition is startled to be set upon by a second nest of nudists in two days, covered in blood and faeces, the men as priapic as ever and they are roaring, “Packemin! Packemin! Aha ha haaa…” And they do love to pack ‘em in, but that’s not what they’re screaming. Everyone is in for a very big surprise.

I’m back onboard and, in case you’re wondering, you need not have read a single sentence of this series before to launch straight in now.

This is far more culturally orientated, Moore extrapolating from the Ennis scenario and musing on what might have happened one hundred years on. For a start, the ozone layer has repaired itself. Well, all our smoke-billowing industries have shut down. So it’s not all bad. It’s still pretty bad and right now I am very much appreciating the safety of my study and my steady supply of Sauvignon Blanc.

In particular Moore is considering what may have happened to language and its slang in a world where there are isolated packs of human beings rather than an instantly accessible global information hub. There are neologisms aplenty, many of which made me smile but – Jonathan and I agree – rather too many. Language should enrich a story, not obfuscate it, and I wince typing this for Alan Moore is one thousand times the writer that I will ever be but, for me, the number rendered the narrative just a little too opaque. Maybe I need a little longer to adjust with a couple more instalments – I’m pretty confident that I am the one more likely to be failing!

Bonus in the back: Ennis is interviewed about CROSSED and comes up with some perceptive observations about heroism in fiction and heroism in reality. Sometimes you try, you really do, but sometimes the situation overwhelms you.

It’ll make you think, I promise.

SLH

Buy Crossed Plus One Hundred #1 and read the Page 45 review here

Tomb Raider vol 1: Season Of The Witch (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Gail Simone & Nicolas Daniel Selma.

“Oww!”

Why the films never incorporated that knee-scraping trademark as an in-joke eludes me.

It was one of my favourite elements. The favourite element of my housemate’s girlfriend was to send Lara Croft careening over a cliff to her bone-crunching death. Over and over again. My, how she chuckled at those really rather vivid sound effects. (I think she may have been jealous!)

Tombraider has been reborn!

Well, partly. There’s still waaaaay too much hand-holding rather than free-roaming exploration (and exasperation, to be sure) in order to solve the puzzles and so wend your way through; but I loved both the emotional investment and the slickness and thrill of the cut-scene-to-first-person-performance of Lara’s last desert-island outing.

I may have skewered an excessive number of innocent deer given that I’m such a strict vegetarian (who wears leather and eats fish – fish are monumentally stupid, don’t you think?) but I felt their pain too, just as I felt Lara’s bewilderment at her outnumbered predicament and whoooooooooooooo I wasn’t going to cross a rope bridge in my life to begin with but now….? Never.

It’s easy to forget that, before its potency was frittered away on several half-arsed outings, the Tombraider franchise was full of the most spectacular and exotic settings: from Escher-like labyrinths of staircases so high up I came down with vertigo and treacherous stone temples with secret passages, hidden traps and demonic creatures lurking in the shadows to rusting tanker hulks abandoned under the ocean… with sharks on the loose!

It was like Antony Johnston’s UMBRAL.

Then there were those sequences which set you on fire like in Venice when you had to pilot a speedboat through the canals and its mines just in time to… I played that to The Propellerheads’ version of ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ and ‘Spybreak’. It took me long-time.

Sorry…? No, I’m not reviewing the comic. Not read it. I’m sure it’s aces, though.

I’m just sharing the love of our candelabra-leaping Lara. Even my Mum got in on the act. Remember when you had to judge whether Lara sprang one-step or two-steps between stone edifices? The entire time Ma and I spent in Venice, we couldn’t help but look up and wonder whether various leaps of confidence were single jumps or “runny-jumps”. Runny jumps!

And we were in Venice!

We’re so fucking cultured, us two.

SLH

Buy Tomb Raider vol 1: Season Of The Witch and read the Page 45 review here

Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #1 (£2-99, Marvel) by Kieron Gillen, Marguerite Bennett & Phil Jimenez, Stephanie Hans.

“It was far too early in the day for murder.
“She really was trying to cut down.”

The two creators communicate; they are on the same page: what Gillen does in his scene-setting envelope is reflected by Bennett in her epistle within. This is a story about loyalty, oath, debt and indebtedness; about having a price, naming that price and then paying that price if that price is not paid.

I should be a bank manager. Or a judge. I’m already a Libran, if that helps.

There’s a lot of dead-pan humour thrown into an already heady mix of action, distraction, reputation and revelation designed to intrigue you further but give you single-issue satisfaction all the same. That’s reasonably rare. There is the mother of all cliff-hangers, don’t get me wrong, but you will still have read something so smile-inducingly succinct with a beginning, middle and end – distilling the very essence of the comics to come – that you will walk away nodding that you now know Angela even if you have never met her before in your life.

Angela has been revealed to be the daughter of Odin and Freyja but was raised to hate all Asgardians because complicated. Don’t worry, it’s all explained in the comic. It’s basically left her between a rock and a hard place, a lineage limbo of sorts, and that’s where we find her, battling through a flesh-tearing temporal sandstorm to save Sera, an angel from Heven (sic).

Flashback to the self-contained sub-story when she did that once before.

Angela used to think that she herself was an angel from Heven but now she knows better. She’s an Asgardian and Asgard and Heven have never got on since Angela was presumed murdered as a newborn babe. I said: “COMPLICATED”! As it so happens, Thor now knows better too and Angela’s done something ever so slightly inflammatory….

Sera aside, I really wouldn’t have recognised Gillen’s book-end sequences as being drawn by Phil Jimenez. Sera’s profiles still boast that George Pérez stamp but inked by the legendary Tom Palmer (John Buscema’s best ink artist) it’s a much fuller affair, closer to Quesada, and I’m equally up for that. Hans meanwhile is more painterly so think Frazer Irving. Either way it’s all very attractive but if you’ll excuse me I need to step back.

It’s “Evisceration Hour”.

For more Angela, please see Bendis’ GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.

SLH

Buy Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #1 and read the Page 45 review here

Wolverine: Origin h/c (£22-50, Marvel) by Paul Jenkins & Andy Kubert, Richard Isanove.

Beautifully packaged hardcover reprint of the softcover reprint of the hardcover reprint of the six-issue series that started off like The Secret Garden (mansion, sickly male child, girl visitor) before blossoming into something really quite powerful. Lost of lush landscapes, gorgeously rendered, and lots of misery spread around by the miserable and twisted. And as hardcover it will sit better on your shelves with ORIGIN II that the ORIGIN I s/c.

For those seeking a straight forward account of Wolverine’s birth, adolescence and the order in which he was enlisted by various agencies before joining the X-Men, you might as well walk away now because Marvel decided not to be so bloody tedious, and instead served up a piece of historical drama, intelligently going for partial revelation with just enough mystery to make you do some of the work yourself.

The sickly, surviving son of wealthy John Howett, James, is given a playmate called Rose. His mother is sequestered on the top floors of the mansion, rarely to be seen since the death of her eldest. Rose recalls the events in her diary, as the pair of them make friends with ‘Dawg’, the gardener’s boy, but of course there’s trouble and whenever there is, James’ irascible grandfather erupts like a volcano and the alcoholic gardener beats his submissive son to a pulp. From the first time you see him, the growling, resentful servant with his feral child will look immediately familiar, and his name will only confirm your suspicions. But I’d curb your initial instincts if I were you, because thankfully this story, like Logan’s lineage, isn’t as obvious as it seems.

Some have said that Jenkins’ attempt at a Brontë feel was a bit naff, but it suits the story and Kubert’s seasonal landscapes, first on the Howlett estate then round the snow-capped mountains and quarries of British Columbia, shifting from parched to verdant then chill, are rendered with detail, majesty and, courtesy of Isanove, a subtlety of colour. The wildlife moves with astonishing vivacity and power, whilst the figure work is all you could hope for.

And, come on, you do want to know now, don’t you…?

SLH

Buy Wolverine: Origin I h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The New 52: Future’s End vol 1 s/c (£29-99, DC) by Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen & Patrick Zircher, Ethan Van Sciver, various…

What If… DC decided to do a massive non-continuity event running weekly for nearly a year that focused on various smaller characters? Obviously not a new thing, they did it before with 52, or perhaps The Old 52 as it should be referred to now. Yes, yes, I know technically that was continuity, apparently filling in the ‘missing year’ between INFINITE CRISIS and, the errr… rather imaginatively titled ONE YEAR LATER (that no one remembers) when Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman had disappeared for some  spurious reason I can’t for the life of me remember, but actually, it was rather enjoyable nonsense.

This is basically more of the same, just with a much more interesting set-up. It all begins 35 years in the future in the BATMAN BEYOND era, which is now apparently in the mainstream DC continuity, whereas it never was before. I know I said this was a non-continuity yarn, but do bear with me, questions may be asked by The Answer Man later and he’s a bigger stickler than Norris McWhirter for detail…

The world of the future is now a total mess with the artificial intelligence Brother Eye having assimilated virtually all our heroes in a dystopian nightmare made real. I’m not quite sure how that factoid ties-in continuity-wise with Batman’s Brother Eye technology from (pre-New 52) THE OMAC PROJECT yet, (does anything pre-New 52 technically have any relevance with current continuity anymore, I honestly have no idea) but given Omacs feature heavily throughout this first volume and it all begins with an elderly cane wielding, if not tap dancing, Bruce Wayne sending the BATMAN BEYOND Batman a.k.a. Terry McGinnis back in time to our era to try and avert the A.I.’s ascension, I’d say it’s a passing nod at least

Anyway, the wrinkle is that Bruce only succeeds in sending Terry back thirty years, to a possible future five years from now, where Earth Prime is recovering from a massive war against alien intruders that came through a dimension rift from Earth 2, which itself had been under attack and virtually destroyed. Note: this really has absolutely nothing to do with the current Earth 2 storyline where Earth 2 is under attack from a vast alien invasion… I know, that confused me as well at first, trying to figure out if it was… I think not anyway…

Vast numbers of Earth Prime heroes were killed in defence of Earth Prime, and only a few hundred thousand Earth 2 refugees, including some of its heroes, were evacuated safely through to this dimension, but now live as mistrusted, stigmatised second-class citizens blamed for the destruction wreaked upon Earth Prime by the aliens – which seems a tad harsh given their world was entirely destroyed, but anyway… Meanwhile, the few surviving Earth 2 heroes have all mysteriously vanished. The overall implication though is that a bigger impending threat to Earth Prime is still looming, which we know of course is the dystopian future of Brother Eye.

What I have enjoyed about this weekly series so far is how it has constantly shifted from set of characters to characters, week after week, focusing mainly on a lot of the old Wildstorm characters like Grifter, Stormwatch etc. but also other random bods like some of the Justice League Dark such as Frankenstein and Amethyst , plus the Atom, Hawkman, Firestorm, Mr. Terrific etc. and only revealing another tiny piece of the much bigger puzzle each time. One issue you’re getting Grifter abducted by Deathstroke and taken to some mysterious island where Cadmus scientists seem to be experimenting on abducted Earth 2 heroes, then it’s into the Bleed where most of Stormwatch are wiped out instantaneously just for fun by some mysterious entity with some as yet unknown connection to what is happening back on Earth, then it’s over to John Constantine trekking round the desert in search of a bearded wandering Superman who seems to be having some sort of existential crisis. And all the while you have Terry McGinnis on his covert undercover mission. He’s obviously realised he’s five years later than he should be of course, but still thinks he can prevent the rise of the machines. He can’t reveal his presence to any of the superheroes of the day, of course, for reasons I won’t elaborate on here, and so is forced to turn to the lower end of the superpowered criminal fraternity for assistance. Who are just delighted to be helping any sort of Batman out of course!

It’s utterly bonkers clearly, but the writing from Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen, who I get the impression are each writing the different slices of what I’ve outlined above is nice, slick stuff, and you feel they are enjoying themselves immensely. So much of the DC output at the moment is so turgid it beggars belief, weighed down under its own pomposity and primary-school-level plotting, so it’s nice to have something that’s a bit more convoluted and involved, frankly.

This is the first extended DC run I’ve read since Geoff Johns’ long GREEN LANTERN run that I can say has held my interest to the same degree, Scott Snyder’s BATMAN aside, and even that has had its patchy moments frankly. I think actually the weekly release schedule in helping in that respect, keeping me engrossed. Plus, compared to the hackneyed drivel that is the current big Marvel event AXIS (and hey, I am a big Rick BLACK SCIENCE / UNCANNY X-FORCE Remender fan), this title is positively Shakespearean.

Anyway, if you want an entertaining doorstep of capes ‘n’ tights material, some 18 issues worth which does just about justify the £29-99 price tag, to sensorially sequester yourself away with on Boxing Day whilst the rest of the family watch endless repeats on the goggle box, this will probably fit the bill. Note: I presume there will be two subsequent volumes if the plan is for it to run to 52 issues or thereabouts.

JR

Buy The New 52: Futures End vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Marshal Law s/c (£22-50, DC) by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill.

“I’m a hero hunter. I hunt heroes. Haven’t found any yet.”

450 pages of smear and loathing, designed to make your mouth curl at the very same time you’re chortling your toes off. You’ll be gurning and groaning, like the Elephantman being given a blowjob.

Before Veitch delivered pretty much the last word worth saying on the pervy nature of superheroes in BRATPACK (although we’ve since been treated to Garth Ennis’ sustained sexual assault in THE BOYS), Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill voiced their own distaste in their ultra-violent, iconoclastic, joke-in-every-corner MARSHAL LAW books. All things establishment and status quo get a jack-booted kick to the crotch, from Reagan and the Church to the Justice League of America and theme parks. It’s kind of like MAD on crack (I did not just type “it’s kind of like” – you never read that), though I don’t mean Kurtzman-esque, for you won’t find too much social dissection going on. That was left, as previous mentioned, to Rick Veitch.

What you will witness is a gross-out ejaculation of repressed sexuality; of sadism, masochism and self-loathing. Maximum punnage is the order of the day and they keep it coming, thick and fast, spawning now-familiar slogans like “Nuke Me Gently.”

It’s not quite as slick as I recall – the voice-overs don’t half interrupt the flow – but it’s still the work of two men having the grimmest of laughs while firing on all cylinders.

This whopping volume, heavy enough to cave in the cranium of anyone in a kinky costume or cape, reprints MARSHAL LAW #1-6, MARSHAL LAW: FEAR AND LOATHING, MARSHAL LAW TAKES MANHATTAN, MARSHAL LAW: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND and MARSHAL LAW: THE HATEFUL DEAD, MARSHAL LAW: SUPER BABYLON and MARSHAL LAW: SECRET TRIBUNAL #1-2. Gallery section, and an introduction by Jonathan Ross.

SLH

Buy Marshal Law s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews as reviews. Neat, huh?


A Bunch Of Amateurs (£4-99) by Andrew Waugh

The Great Salt Lake (£5-00) by Matt Taylor

Bad Machinery vol 3: The Case Of The Simple Soul (£14-99) by John Allison

Brass Sun vol 1: The Wheel Of Worlds h/c (£25-00, Rebellion) by Ian Edginton & I.N.J. Culbard

The Complete D.R. & Quinch (£11-99, Rebellion) by Alan Moore, Jamie Delano, Alan Davis & Alan Moore

Disenchanted vol 2 s/c (£14-99, Avatar) by Simon Spurrier & German Erramouspe

Enigma s/c (£13-50, Vertigo) by Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo

The Graphic Canon Of Children’s Literature (£25-99, Seven Studies) by various, edited by Russ Kick

In The Frame 2012-2014 (£12-00) by Tom Humberstone

The Royals – Masters Of War s/c (£10-99, Vertigo) by Rob Williams & Simon Coleby

Showa 1944 – 1953: A History Of Japan vol 3  (£18-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by Shigeru Mizuki

The Walking Man h/c (£14-99, Fanfare – Ponent Mon) by Jiro Taniguchi

William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back h/c (£11-99, Quirk) by Ian Doescher

William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return h/c (£11-99, Quirk) by Ian Doescher

Nightwing vol 5: Setting Son s/c (£12-99, DC) by Kyle Higgins & various

Red Hood And The Outlaws vol 5: The Big Picture s/c (£10-99, DC) by James Tynion IV, Will Pfeifer, Joe Keatinge & various

Superman: Unchained Deluxe Edition h/c (£22-50, DC) by Scott Snyder & Jim Lee

Guardians Of The Galaxy vol 3: Guardians Disassembled (UK Edition) s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Nick Bradshaw, various

Mighty Avengers vol 3: Original Sin – Not Your Fathers Avengers s/c (£10-99, Marvel) by Al Ewing & Greg Land

Savage Hulk vol 1: Man Within s/c (£13-50, Marvel) by Alan Davis, Stan Lee & Alan Davis, Sal Buscema

Attack On Titan: Before The Fall vol 3 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Ryo Suzukaze & Satoshi Shiki

Battle Angel Alita Last Order Omnibus vol 5 (£14-99, Kodansha) by Yukito Kishiro

Ranma 1/2 2-in-1 vols 9 & 10 (£9-99, Viz) by Rumiko Takahashi

Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire vol 1 (£8-99, Viz) by Naoki Serizawa

Spell Of Desire vol 2 (£6-99, Viz) by Tomu Ohmi 

News!

ITEM! It’s glove weather! So the other morning I rootled through my winter wardrobe (it’s a heap of jumpers and scarves on the bedroom floor) and I found my gloves, hurray! Slight problem, I suspect. I just can’t put my thumb on it.

ITEM! Lizz Lunney’s one-a-day advent calendar comics are hilarious. For best results follow Lizz @LizzLizz on Twitter. For catastrophic results follow me on the Good Ship Drunk As Fuck @pagefortyfive where we sail the stormy — [you’re fired – ed.]

ITEM! I have been offline at home which is where I generally glean these ITEM!s. It’s very disconcerting. It’s like living in a cold dark cave. Thankfully my cave comes with a fridge full of Sauvignon Blanc. I’m diving in now.

Cheers,

– Stephen

Page 45 Reviews December 2014 week one

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014

A damning indictment of man’s ceaseless inhumanity to man in the form of oppression, warfare and retribution: its attempts to justify war in the name of God or country; its failure to learn or advance except in more effective means of destruction; individuals’ consistent failure in power to live up to their promises made in revolution, and all the endemic, sorry subterfuge behind it all.

 – Stephen on Arkwright Integral by Bryan Talbot

Grandville vol 4: Noël (£16-99, Jonathan Cape) by Bryan Talbot.

“We’d best get on with it, then.”
“Sure. All hogtied up like this? You don’t happen to have anything sharp on you, do yuh?”
“Are you joking?

The badger bears his teeth.

The badger really bares his teeth in this fourth anthropomorphic outing to Grandville (Paris), as does its creator Bryan Talbot.

With a title like NOÊL you might expect a lot of Christmas presents – there are certainly enough Easter Eggs – and maybe some saccharine school nativity scenes.

But not from someone like Talbot who here grabs two of my own bêtes noires firmly by the throat and throttles them: organised religion with its avarice, mendacity, brainwashing and hate-mongering, and the similarly styled, racist far-right surging right now in Britain with UkiP as it has for a long time in France under the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and his equally loathsome daughter Marine Le Pen who in September topped a presidential poll.

Think about that. You are allowed to get angry; it’s all right if you cry.

 

The prologue takes us a little further afield than usual in GRANDVILLE, to the American East Coast where a religious cult led by a gryphon and its high-priest unicorn celebrates its sanctity by committing mass suicide. “Miraculously” the gryphon and unicorn survive along with their resident, decrepit old mutt of a doctor. Next stop: Grandville…

Back in London it’s beginning to snow, heralding holiday time for Scotland Yard’s Detective-Inspector LeBrock and Detective Sergeant Ratzi who invites LeBrock, his mother and children over for Christmas, along with LeBrock’s girlfriend Billie who, not to put too fine a point of it, is a Parisian prostitute. So that could prove awkward.

Before that, however, LeBrock is implored by his guinea-pig landlady to find her missing niece. Alienated from home by an abusive step-dad who also happens to be a badger (“These mixed marriages never work” – ouch), she doesn’t appear to have been abducted but instead to have found God and fallen foul of The Silver Path’s propaganda handed out by her school gates. The Silver Path and its Church of Evolutionary Theology are based in Grandville. The girl had recently returned from a school trip there and now she’s gone again along with some freshly packed clothes, her step-dad’s wallet, the cash from his money box and all her mother’s jewels.

Guess who’s in charge of the Church of Evolutionary Theology? Guess who’s the guiding light of and along The Silver Path?

As LeBrock steps up his investigations across The Channel he discovers Grandville gripped by a crime wave following extortion mob-boss Tiberius Koenig’s complete victory over the city, buying up all the brothels and much more besides.

On top of that bigotry is rampant. Disparagingly referred to as “doughfaces” (even by LeBrock), humans – very much an underclass discriminated against and often refused board or entry to cafes, bars and clubs – have been campaigning for, well, human rights, and violence on both sides is escalating rapidly. All of which is opportunistically seized on by The Silver Path which has already been fanning the flames of fear and prejudice by blaming the “doughfaces” for every imaginable societal problem, and whose gryphon and unicorn now announce a sister political party with a Final Solution. That is what you think, yes.

The True Gospels mystery I’m going to studiously avoid for fearing of giving too much away, but by gum this is a clever and complex graphic novel, its subplots so intricately interwoven and the implications of its revelations even craftier than you might think. Let us discuss after class instead! I’d so dearly love that!

Back to the story, however, and LeBrock has the bright idea of enlisting the aid of Billie herself to infiltrate The Silver Path cult thereby creating another potential problem, finds himself desperate for the aid of American sharp-shooter Chance Lucas (haha!) of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and is so forced to confront his own prejudices.

 

I like that. Matt Wagner did the same thing with Wesley Dodds in SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE VOL 7: show his hero to have very similar failings.

From my brief burst of parenthetical laughter you will have gathered that, as ever with GRANDVILLE, there are so many Easter egg bonuses. That is Lucky Luke, you did spy Asterix and Obelix (the trousers are a dead giveaway), there are a couple of nods to Hergé and other childhood favourites, and that dying pose is unmissable as The Pietà. There are dozens more, but my favourite is Nicholas, the boss-eyed gryphon (it’s no coincidence that both religious leaders are mythological creatures, the gryphon based on Sir John Tenniel’s), doing his best Adolf Hitler impression during The Last Supper before sitting there silent and smug. Nicholas the gryphon? Nick Griffin, former leader of Britain’s neo-Nazi National Front party. It looks exactly like him!

As ever with Talbot, it is craft, craft, craft all the way with no skimping on detail. Some of the costumes here are ridiculously rich in colour flourishes, the architecture does Paris full justice and the interiors are equally lush. Plus you will love the gondola-like aerial sky tram used here like a James Bond set piece. There’s so much action, choreographed to perfection and you’ll get all your steam, punk, I promise!

The theology is equally up to scratch and meticulously researched, although on reflection I doubt Bryan had to do much more than check a few minutiae – he knows this sort of stuff. That the historical facts involving the True Gospels have been so cleverly utilised for his own anthropomorphic plot’s ends… well, once more, let’s discuss after class, shall we?

Finally, you get quite the bang for your buck. This is as dense as it is intense and whereas most stories are over once the fat lady has sung to crescendo so shattering the glass, here the repercussions are extensive with scene after scene of reprise, reversal, revelation and startling cliffhanger prologue before you even get to the most satisfying four-page epilogue of this series yet. *zips mouth, moves on*

Finally, finally, I think you’ve earned yourself some comedy, so here’s the nannyish Doctor Ermintrude Bovery, head of Religious Studies. Something’s really got her goat:

“You’re another damned atheist, are you, Mister LeBrock? I suppose you’re a meat-eater to boot.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Why, oh why, are only intelligent people vegetarian? If your evolution tomfoolery were true, Ursine, you’d find that your brains were bequeathed by ancestors who ate no meat.”
“On the contrary. We couldn’t possibly have evolved from a herbivore species.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because, my dear Doctor… IT DOESN’T TAKE A GREAT DEAL OF INTELLIGENCE TO SNEAK UP ON A BLADE OF GRASS!”

SLH

Buy Grandville vol 4: Noël and read the Page 45 review here

Arkwright Integral h/c (£45-00, Dark Horse) by Bryan Talbot.

Hefty hardcover reprinting both THE ADVENTURES OF LUTHER ARKWRIGHT and HEART OF EMPIRE which, at the time of typing, are both out of print.

Bonus material not previously reprinted in either softcover includes all nine full-colour covers to Dark Horse’s serialisation, all nine full-colour covers to Valkyrie Press’ serialisation plus its ARKeogology, the three UK trade paperback covers, a substantial chunk of the enormous Bryan Talbot Arkwright Interview conducted by SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING’s Stephen R. Bissette originally published in 2012 and a new afterword / tribute by TRANSMETROPOLITAN’S Warren Ellis.

Here we go, then, first with THE ADVENTURES OF LUTHER ARKWRIGHT:

A damning indictment of man’s ceaseless inhumanity to man in the form of oppression, warfare and retribution: its attempts to justify war in the name of God or country; its failure to learn or advance except in more effective means of destruction; individuals’ consistent failure in power to live up to their promises made in revolution, and all the endemic, sorry subterfuge behind it all.

Bryan’s knowledge of political history is matched only by his command in communicating its lessons, however they may ignored by our lessers, and for a work which is essentially science fiction involving multiple parallel worlds, precognition and psychometry, this has its feet planted firmly in British history and on its very streets as Luther Arkwright is dispatched to a key parallel world in which Britain never succeeded in unshackling itself from its Cromwellian past. There he must uncover the Disruptor agents that have infiltrated key positions in the world’s governments and in particular that of repressionist, Puritan Britain, marshal the underground Royalist forces and start a great big fucking revolution to uncover the legendary Firefrost and prevent pan-dimensional Armageddon. I know that it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.

This is a work that is rich in texture, vast in scope and charged with sexual energy. It’s also incredibly dense in its truest sense, for it could have been expanded into four times its length with no filler whatsoever. Instead, by weaving Arkwright’s complex history through the threads of the main narrative, by gradually lacing the present and particular with what is known of the parallels’ past, and by excavating as they go what few clues the guardians of central and stable Para 00:00:00 have of the mysterious Firefrost, their role and their goal in locating that ultimate weapon of mass destruction is slowly revealed. It really is intoxicating, as is the central climax of orgasmic satori when Arkwright rises from his own ashes – a phoenix primed with pure impressionistic poetry – which by contrast is allowed to explode across the pages in all its lush allusion. For anyone else this would be their magnum opus, not their opening salvo.

As indicated, Talbot has much to say about governments and war. The Firefrost, as its name implies, is an entity of opposites, a conjugation capable of destruction and creation, death and rebirth: the ultimate weapon of mass destruction designed to preserve life “until inevitably – as with any deterrent – it was activated”. Concise and to the point, I think you’ll agree.

Nathaniel Cromwell, Lord Protector and head of the Church of England, is an exceedingly ugly creation. A puritanical preacher, he rages against sin yet fornicates in secret, forcing himself on young royalist virgins, bound and gagged in the dark. Riddled with venereal disease, he is rabid in public whilst, in private, deliriously drunk; he is plagued by his father’s abuse which left him sexually disfigured. Even the revolutionary Queen Anne has a ruthless side that will take you by surprise – or maybe not if you’ve read HEART OF EMPIRE. Just like HEART OF EMPIRE (a sequel of sorts) this shares its Shakespearian elements contrasting affairs of state with backstreet bawdiness, and this has an awful lot of omens. Bryan has a worryingly broad and vivid imagination when it comes to the hundreds of worldwide catastrophes visiting the other parallel worlds! Here too are the Hogarthian references as you’ll see down in Cheapside overlooked (I think) by Westminster, as foul-mouthed farter Harry Fairfax (again, some relation to Sir Thomas) questions the meaning of it all.

It’s also in Cheapside especially that the true majesty of the art – until now smothered and smudged beyond all recognition by a printing process inadequate to the task – really shines in this new shooting. The sheer detail on every page is remarkable from the exterior architecture with its intricate cross-hatching to the textures of a library crammed full of foliage, cloth and cultural carvings, and the final battle is epic. Steeped in British legend and lore (Boudicca, Britannia, George and the Dragon…), the World War fighter planes are dwarfed by futuristic helicarriers which hover in the sky like mighty, metal, military toads defying the laws of gravity. Absolute carnage!

October 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the first pages seeing print in one form or another, and I think what may be most remarkable about this is that Talbot had the drive, ambition and courage back then to embark on it at all. That he then managed to successfully complete such a complex and painstakingly rendered grand narrative of sequential art which the British and American markets at the time were neither ready for nor willing to pay properly for, paving the way for future sales and showing what could and should be done, leaves us as progressive retailers (and others as subsequent comicbook creators), I believe, substantially in the great man’s debt.

Please note: readers of editions earlier than 2007 really won’t recognise what they see here: there are mountains whose delineation never made it onto the printed page and stars will explode in a night that was previously pitch-black – or rather bland grey. For many comicbook readers this is their favourite graphic novel of all time, and they’ll now need another copy to see what it should have looked like.

Talbot wrote to me:

Yes, I was trying to do a Hogarthian scene – though it’s not based on any specific one. I just looked at the page in the Czech edition with a magnifying glass and there’s a lot of stuff in there I’d forgotten – me at the drawing board looking out of the top left window, a woman hanging washing in the BG of the next window along, people pissing and fornicating in the narrow alleyway, an old guy sitting on the steps crushing body lice with his thumbnails (as seen in a plate from The Harlot’s Progress – the prison scene). And I noticed, for the first time, not having gone through this edition religiously, that Vaclav Dort, the publisher, has even unobtrusively translated the graffiti on the walls. I think that the tower is one from the old St Paul’s cathedral – the one that burned down on this parallel in the great fire of London 1666. You can see it two pages earlier in the rooftop scene. That scene is based on a Doré print – ‘cept in that it’s the new St Paul’s in the BG. Likewise before the Battle of London when Rose walks up to Westminster Abbey, it has the domes capping the side buttresses that were replaced on our parallel a couple of hundred years ago.
Best,
Bryan

And now our second feature this evening, HEART OF EMPIRE:

Highly ambitious, very British and totally engrossing work, this uses all the clarity and majesty Talbot found for THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT.

It is, in fact, thoroughly Shakespearean both in scope and treatment, alternating between high matters of state and street-level bawdiness whilst emphasising the connection through social and sexual decadence amongst the aristocracy and their entourage, and revolutionary aspirations and individual courage in the no-go areas of London. Then there’s the dilemma raging between the individual and his/her role in society, the missing kin, the moment of upheaval and the looming cataclysm – all traditional elements of Elizabethan theatre; it might be stretching it a bit but the parallel worlds could be looked at as foreign territory and the science fantasy element as replacing the role of magic.

As to the story itself, 23 years ago Luther Arkwright saved this alternate reality, leaving behind him a wife, two children and an ambitious empire whose heart is Albion (England), and which has by now conquered most of the known world outside of America. Only the Vatican is allowed a modicum of independence. This world is very much a contemporary of ours – the two US reporters make that clear – but so much of it is Victoria in extremis: the all-consuming, rapaciously greedy imperialism, the vast state expenditure on monument (Talbot’s art here, particularly for the creation of the neo-Crystal Palace and its environs, is awe-inspiring, right up there with Guy Davis but with his own distinctive light and clarity), the seemingly unassailable, matriarchal monarchy, slavery bolstered by racism and apartheid, the hypocritical sexual values forced upon the commoners yet flouted by the well-to-do, flaunting both their bosoms and their catamites. Some sciences have advanced whilst others languish, superstitious prophets and quacks maintaining weight amongst the court, madhouses still the destination of the unstable or politically undesirable.

From the very first page looking out through a Roman window, with its overripe fruit cleaved by a knife, the waste, decadence and latent violence is made patently clear.

Talbot’s anti-authoritarian credentials are well documented (see ALICE IN SUNDERLAND’s substantial post-script), and this work has at its heart a total disgust for inequality, control and corruption. Machinations are rife. Brutality is common. Sycophancy permeates the court. But even so Talbot is not so dismissive as to avoid counter-arguments, and his strength as a writer shines through in his portrayal of the protagonist, for the princess at the heart of the story has a journey to make, and as the story opens she is as cold and aloof as the empire but has made use of its wealth, power and her own talent to build an astoundingly beautiful city, replete with buildings, squares and vistas rarely seen since the Renaissance, and on a scale we don’t even aspire to any longer.

The resources of the many squandered by the few on self-aggrandising, imperialist spectacle…? Well of course, but it’s more than a little tempting to mourn such architectural planning and achievement, especially after Talbot’s pen lines.

The book also boasts some fine Alan Moore-ish LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN mock endpapers, a great deal of explicit sex and I wasn’t kidding about the bawdy humour, so be warned. Okay, back to the plot and an interdimensional apocalypse approaches…

Haha!

Quick reminder that you can find Page 45’s Bryan Talbot interview in our website’s FUN & RESOUCES section. There are several paragraphs there relevant to this including a couple of behind-the-scenes secrets.

SLH

Buy Arkwright Integral h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Opus (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Satoshi Kon.

“So it’s true… my life is someone else’s story…”

Prepare yourselves for a mind-melt!

“Somehow I expected God to have a beard… not two days’ growth.”

You may have read comicbook metafiction before like Grant Morrison’s ANIMAL MAN or Dave Sim’s CEREBUS: MINDS wherein the fourth wall is breached, creator meets the characters and Grant Morrison’s cat becomes copyright DC, but this goes several steps further with a conclusion previously unpublished which… well, we’ll get there, don’t worry.

Satoshi Kon created the gripping graphic novel TROPIC OF THE SEA and directed the anime Perfect Blue which also impressed me no end. (His second film, Millennium Actress, tied with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away for the Grand Prize in the Japan Agency Of Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival.)

In terms of comics, however, this is the big one. The second I banged the book open I thought of AKIRA and there’s some serious structural damage going on here too, but the cause is dramatically different.

As the story opens Chikara Nagai’s spectacularly successful manga series, ‘Resonance’, is reaching its dramatic, nay shocking conclusion. Psychics Satoko and Lin are confronting The Masque, a mesmerising religious cult leader of The Nameless Faith. The Masque does indeed go down but takes Lin with him in a blast of pyschokinetic energy that bursts right through Lin’s chest and out of his back. Even its publishers never saw the ending coming, largely because Chikara changed it at the last minute. He’s just shown his editor the rough, pencilled pages.

“Wait. You’re killing off Lin…?”
“Yep.. bang! Epic, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s badass, and I like what you did, but… what happened to Satoko defeating The Masque…? The happy ending… all that?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I tried a few ideas… but with Lin becoming more prominent in volume three, The Masque got stronger also. Too tough for Satoko to realistically take out… I thought this would make for a big finish.”

His editor trusts him and gives him the go-ahead but…

“I guess everyone has their favourite character… I just hate to see him go out like that.”
“I’m sure Lin hates to go like that, too…!”

And he laughs. Oh, Chikara, so glib, so glib… Those words are going to come back to bite you.

In spite of the deadline pressure Chikara relishes inking the final-page shocker but it does leave him frazzled. There’s a bang and a quake and now a new piece of artists’ bristol board materialises on his desk depicts a narrow shaft leading down with Lin crawling angrily up.

“You’re not getting rid of me that easily, asshole…!”

Several seconds later the comicbook artist finds himself tumbling down this Lewis Carroll-ian rabbit hole and trapped in the very fictional world he created himself but hasn’t quite finished. The Masque is still very much alive and bent on his destruction; Lin – determined to avoid his final, brutal fate – has swiped the book’s final-page splash and is bent on changing the future by destroying his fictional past; Satoko with her own childhood trauma is reluctant to go where no woman has gone before; and Lin’s young, blind, second-sight sister Mei registers what they are all reluctant to accept.

“The truth is that this world is fiction.”

That, I can assure you, is only the tip of this metafictional iceberg destined to destroy everyone’s lives and “lives”. Cracks begin to appear between reality and fiction and within the very volumes of the fiction itself as Lin tears through the pages of the last book to crawl himself into the earlier ones and stop the serial killer who will later become The Masque before The Masque kills the copper who will be reincarnated as Lin.

Look, I told you this would melt your mind.

I haven’t even touched on the logic that if a creator can become trapped in his own comicbook fiction then it stands to reason that fictional characters can break out into reality. A reality which is a fiction, by the way, because this graphic novel was created by Satoshi Kon not Chikara Nagai.

You just wait until the final chapter.

That final chapter, as I say, is new. Just like ‘Resonance’ never gets completed because… oh, you’ll see…Satoshi’s animation career took off so spectacularly that OPUS itself never got finished. Oh, the ironies! The final chapter here was found in Satoshi’s personal files after his passing and is printed in pencils with the script inked-in with the permission of Satoshi’s family.

This is a 350-page monster with incredible depth and I had so much more to report. Pages of notes! Like when Satoko is spotted in our world by a manga fan and assumed to be a cosplayer. When Satoko spies the artist’s girlfriend and realises who she’d modelled on. And when the artist improvises in his own fictional world by grabbing a moped to escape pursuit because his studio artist has put in all the hard work.

Background details! You gotta love ‘em…”

SLH

Buy Opus and read the Page 45 review here

Night Post h/c (£12-99, Improper Books) by Benjamin Read & Laura Trinder…

Like Raymond Briggs’ Snowman meets the Munsters in a true monster mash-up, this wordless yarn will bring a little festive fright cheer into your homes this Christmas. Actually, as our story begins with a typical day like any other drawing to a close, it is clear from the profusion of pumpkins peering out spookily from windows or devilishly illuminating doorsteps that this is around Halloween. But, irrespective of the time of year, the post must go out. So, after a doting dad has settled his precious little princess with a story, it’s out to work, heading off to the ‘Regal Mail’ depot for the late shift. Which is where we get our first hint that the job of the night postie might not be quite so straightforward as during the waking hours…

Past the restricted access door marked ‘Night Post’, down the endless, uneven stone steps to a gloomy dungeon lit only by a flaming brazier, our postie at last approaches a huge wooden door, festooned with elaborate ironmongery. With the aid of the golden key hanging half-hidden round his neck, he gains access into the inner sanctum of… the sorting office… Yes, at first glance you might think this is just a normal bustling posse of posties, sorting their bags and plotting their routes, but look closer… Are those bats hanging from the rafters? Do some of his colleagues look, well, a little ghoulish? Why are there tentacles wriggling out from underneath that desk?! Why is there a crocodile encased in purple paper wrapped paper complete with a lovely red bow perched on top of that desk?!! Still, his workmates give him a cheery wave and welcome him in, like it’s all perfectly normal. And, after some slight difficulties ramming one last huge, bizarrely shaped parcel into his TARDIS-like bicycle panniers, he’s ready to turn those peddles and get posting, which is where the fun-filled fright-fest really begins!

 

 

Ghosts, goblins, witches, werewolves, zombies, vampires, in fact pretty much every horror monster ever conceived, created or indeed brought to life with lightning in a laboratory are on our intrepid postie’s route. Most are delighted to receive their letters and parcels, but there are more than a few that just can’t help reverting to type and trying to munch their messenger immediately after receipt! How very ungrateful of them! Our valiant envoy of the Regal Mail will manage to complete his deliveries of course, rest assured, but there are going to be many an amusing close call along the way!

Ah, this is great fun. I loved reading it to my daughter, who does like her monsters, and hearing her cackle with delight as the postie came ever closer to being somebody’s supper. I say “read”, mind you, but do bear in mind this is a wordless tale. The upside of course being it will stimulate the imagination of children everywhere as their inner narrator gets to work composing a soundtrack and dialogue for the action. The downside is if you’re a knackered dad wanting to get his child off to bed so you can finally relax, you’ll have to put a bit more work in doing a monstrous enough narration to satisfy your audience. Actually I felt rather like I’d put on a one-man Hammer House of Horror half hour homage show by the time I’d finished – PG rated, obviously – but it was well worth it listening to Isabella’s giggles. Trust me, though, doing sound effects for the Creature From The Black Lagoon plays havoc with your tonsils…

So much to admire in the script and artwork here, there are some absolutely brilliant visual gags, such as when you find out that the vampire’s parcel in fact contains a vegetarian cookbook! Ben has really thought through his narrative and Laura has illustrated it to perfection in a style that is a glorious mix of Raymond Briggs and Charles Vess. There is an immense amount of work gone into the storytelling here, which of course is essential if you are going to do a wordless book, but having read more children’s books than I can recall in the last three and a half years, I can truly say this has been produced with so much more love and attention to detail by its creators than most. Adults will get a kick out of spotting all the classic monsters, as I did, and kids will adore the fact that it’s a teeny, weeny bit scary yet utterly ridiculous at the same time. Plus, there is that all important happy ending which I thought was very sweet and touching, actually.

JR

Buy Night Post h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Maleficium (£11-99, Avery Hill Publishing) by EdieOP…

“I DON’T NEED A BATH! I’VE CAST A CLEAN SPELL SO THERE!!!”

Ha ha, very funny. In our house it is usually not wanting to have hair washed and conditioned, because a certain somebody knows as sure as night follows day that the comb will then come out. And when your hair mysteriously likes to entangle itself in Gordian-level knots that even the hoariest of salty sea dogs would find tricky to untie, well, it’s going to hurt. So, a combed hair spell would be ideal.

Parking the preamble and moving on… Huxley Leighton-Lomax is a tiny tot of a wizard. With a cute hat that looks more akin to Wee Willie Winkie’s than Merlin’s, he’s clearly just begun the perilous path of mystic learning. Which probably explains why he’s not aware that feeding the monster under your bed with cornflakes is never, ever a good idea. He thinks he’s just doing his new friend a good turn, which is sweet of him, bless him, but as the monster begins to get hungrier, taking a fancy to Huxley’s little sister, he realises he’s got a serious problem. Unfortunately for Huxley, his dad doesn’t believe for a moment that malicious forces are at work, disrupting their household; he just thinks Huxley’s wild imagination is running away with him causing chaos. So it looks like it’s going to be up to Huxley to save the day and vanquish the monster all by himself! I reckon he’s up to the task…

 

Another exquisitely well produced release from Avery Hill featuring the talents of EDieOP who had a tale in issue #2 of the Avery Hill house anthology READS where I made the point that she has a great sense of fun and also a uniquely endearing art style. And so it is here, in her first longer-form work. There is a lovely sense of mischief in this yarn, you never really get the sense Huxley and his sister are in mortal peril, but the creepy critter inhabiting the house, all black and shapeless with multiple grasping hands, is certainly an intimidating foe for a wannabe wizard of such tender years. Not that Huxley is intimidated, far from it, Huxley doesn’t do intimidated, but initially at least, he really struggles to keep a lid of what is threatening to develop into full blown pandemonium. It’s just so unfair his dad is convinced it’s all just Huxley being naughty!

I do love EdieOP’s art style. It’s rare anyone lets you see all the initial pencil guidelines under their watercolours, but it really adds a sense of depth and motion to her panels. She’s gone for a quite a subdued palette of various hues of blue here, compared to her fairly riotous use of colour in The Story Of Lucius Jellybean (her story in READS about a whole new lifeform created from a dissolved slug), though I completely understand why. As does Huxley once he locates the relevant spook in his wizard’s tome on the Paranormal, as this beastie likes nothing more than to lurk and forment fear from the shadows. A great all-ages read and perfect for terrorising tiny tots as what might be lurking under the bed if they don’t stop wriggling about and fall asleep!

JR

Buy Maleficium and read the Page 45 review here

Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream h/c (£55-00, Locust Moon Press) by a multitude of talented artists.

What a whopper!

This hardcover is so utterly enormous I cannot take it home to review.

It’s not so much a coffee-table book but – pop four stacks of bricks underneath it – a coffee table.

Take a quick gander at this list of creators: Bill Sienkiewicz, J.H. Williams III, Paul Pope, Michael Allred, David Mack, Stephen Bissette, Craig Thompson, Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon, Peter Bagge, J.G. Jones, Yuko Shimizu and many, many more.

If you’re unfamiliar with Winsor McCay’s original LITTLE NEMO published between 1905 and 1914, the titular chappy was a young lad in pyjamas travelling through his dreams to Slumberland, inevitably waking at the bottom of each page in one panic or another, to be consoled by parent or grandparent.

The concept, character and indeed the very format have all been used, incorporated or adapted to their own works by an extraordinary number of modern creators, most obviously by Gaiman in ‘The Dolls House’ chapter of SANDMAN.

The architecture, the warped scales (everything’s either far bigger or smaller), the perspectives, the design element (gradually elongated, vertical panels climaxing in Nemo tumbling from his bed, for instance), and the figure drawing were nothing short of spectacular, and more often than not a single page will have you mesmerised by a meticulous and improbably successful use of colour and pattern motif (striped shirts, dancing mermaid tails, elephant heads, whathaveyou) perfectly placed throughout the individual panels. Awesome to behold.

Here, have a sense of scale next to UMBRAL VOL 1.

SLH

Buy Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Serenity vol 4: Leaves On The Wind h/c (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Zack Whedon & Georges Jeanty, Fabio Moon.

I’ll come clean.

Well, I would if this blood would wash off, but we seem to be in Shakespearean “seas incarnadine” season as I commit so many culpable sins on Twitter.

It was Black Friday last, uh, Friday and I felt we had to join in with the special offer that if you gave Page 45 £45 we would give you £45’s worth of comics. Bonanza!

Seriously, retailers: don’t discount! You’re only hurting yourselves. I can honestly say that it drove me to drink – although I did ask to pull over when I saw that the off-licence was offering a two-for-one wine offer. I hate myself.

Sorry, where were we?

Basingstoke. Right…

“In the film Serenity, outlaw Malcolm Reynolds and his crew revealed to the entire ‘verse the crimes against humanity undertaken by the sinister Alliance government. In this official follow-up, circumstances force the crew to come out of hiding, and one of their own is captured, setting them on another mission of rescue and resistance . . . Collects the six-issue miniseries and the 2012 Free Comic Book Day story.”

Okay, yes, I’ll come clean: I’ve not read a word of this nor seen a single second of its on-screen incarnation but you seem to care because we’ve sold pod-loads which is why I mention it now. I might also mention the recent arrival of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SEASON 10 VOL 1 s/c which seems to tie in this blatant piece of hucksterism.

Potentially brilliant!

I am a capitalist nightmare come true.

SLH

Buy Serenity vol 4: Leaves On The Wind h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Punk Rock Jesus: Deluxe Edition h/c (£29-99, Vertigo) by Sean Murphy.

I can’t get it out of my head.

I started singing “Punk-Rock Jee-sus” to the tune of Captain Scarlet and now that mind-worm is here to stay.

Dun-dun dun de-de dun! Whoo!

Hold this sucker side-on and you will see from all the white that a phenomenal third of this hardcover is extras above and beyond the PUNK ROCK JESUS softcover.

I have never in all my years as a comics reader seen such a wealth of process-piece material whereby you sneak behind the scenes like an errant school-child to see deleted scenes, thoughts in progress, character designs, sketches, thumbnails, self-analysis, concept art, studio photos… This is an artist’s artist edition. This is the Holy Grail!

Which is an interesting analogy given what we’re considering.

What we’re considering is this:

“What kinds of things will he be learning?”
“Math, English, American History, Creationism, Faith Healing.”
“Creationism and Faith Healing? You’re kidding me.”
“Many of our viewers are fundamentalist and would be uncomfortable with their saviour learning about science and evolution.”
“That’s ridiculous! The benefit of a billion-dollar learning centre, and all you teach is dogma?”
“It’s the American way.”

It begins with a prayer swiftly answered by violence. God knows where it will all end.

Ophis Entertainment has announced a new reality show starring the first human clone in history: it’s Jesus Christ himself.

Whether or not the revolution will be televised, the countdown to the Second Coming will! Season one will commence with conception and climax at birth. After that both nature and nurture will be on camera 24/7. Audience figures for the J2 Project will reach 3 billion daily and, in order to achieve those ratings, smarmy Dick Slate will do anything – absolutely anything. The insidiousness begins on day one, and the levels it reaches will stagger you.

First it requires a scientist: Dr. Sarah Epstein, geneticist in service to saving the environment. In 2013 she cloned polar bears in an attempt to stave off their extinction, then developed a hyper plant which fed off carbon dioxide faster than anything else. She even tried to pollinate the Brazilian rainforest before being stung by lawsuits from six fast-food chains. Now she’s determined to engineer new strains of algae to halt global warming but to do that she needs funds.

“And if I have to resurrect Jesus Christ to do it, then I will.”

Next the Immaculate Conception requires a self-sacrificial virgin in the form of naïve 18-year-old Gwen Fairling (presented to the world after some swift cosmetic surgery – teeth, nose, breasts), then some of our saviour’s DNA. And, you know, whatever happens next, this exchange on live television should certainly be born in mind:

“There’s never been any evidence that the [Turin] Shroud is as old as Christians would like to believe. And carbon dating has proven that. Most important here is no one outside of Ophis has been allowed to verify the validity of the DNA.”
“Blasphemy. Carbon dating is flawed – the Shroud is real and that proves Jesus was, too!”
“Is what Father Sterlins says true?”
“There’s no disputing carbon data. And there’s never been any empirical evidence that a person named Jesus Christ ever existed.”
“How dare you! Scientists are not to be trusted! Their arrogance has given us atomic bombs and nuclear waste. They tell us that we all come from monkeys, and insist on telling that to our children.”
“Evolution through natural selection is a fact. Fossil records prove it.”
“Evolution is just a theory!”
“So is gravity.”

Some of the Christian contingent are all for it – it combines their favourite pastimes to perfection – while others like the New American Christians protest vociferously outside Ophis’ island HQ. They’d far rather protest inside the high-tech laboratory turned TV studio, of course, which is where our Irish head of security comes in, born of sectarian violence. Yes, Murphy’s brought Northern Ireland into this already flammable mix: Thomas is a former member of the IRA!

I think it was HELLBLAZER’s Andy Diggle who first said to Sean, “And Vertigo gave this the green light?!?” You’ve got to admire the guy’s guts, for this is as packed as the pulp paper it’s printed on with plot and sub-plottery destined to offend all and sundry. Or delight them. I am totally delighted.

Don’t think this is but a convenient peg on which to hang Thomas’ heart or explain his efficacy, either. The book begins twenty years earlier with his parents’ slaughter right before his impressionable eyes, leaving young Thomas vulnerable to his uncle’s indoctrination. The Irish troubles are addressed and indeed redressed later on – if not in full then certainly in terms of Thomas’ history – and it’s all very far from random.

Indeed every element of this socio-political masterpiece is commendably complex and thought right the way through. For what follows is everything you suspected of Reality TV, taken to the extremes deemed necessary when your star is supposedly the saviour: media manipulation, emotional blackmail and indeed outright abuse, all in service to the ratings.

Gwen’s trajectory is particularly tragic, trapped as she is in this fishbowl for her own personal safety and stuck on a white-knuckle ride she could never conceive of. When she turns to drink (supplied by Slate to “cheer her up”) and mistakenly fills her baby’s bottle up with wine rather than juice, it’s spun as a biblical miracle while Gwen herself sinks even further into self-loathing. As to Jesus “Chris” Christ, fed lies all his life, well, you know what happens when you hit your teens: you take your education into your own hands and it generally begins with vinyl. All his life he’s been shown how to grab the public’s attention, so over the years he’s learned a thing or two and when the worm turns, the tables do too.

As to the art, you’ve already swooned over Sean Murphy on THE WAKE, JOE THE BARBARIAN and HELLBLAZER: CITY OF DEMONS and this is every bit as thrilling in its post-Bachalo, black-and-white beauty – a comparison which holds true right down to the o’er-shaded nose tips. It is so ridiculously rich in detail, from the Irish pub walls to the stadium-sized concerts, that you can only gasp at the sheer graft which Sean has put in. The action sequences are spectacular, for Murphy doesn’t half love his motorbikes and the NAC will seize any opportunity to sabotage the show. Also, when the Flak Jackets strike their opening crash-chords the pages sound as loud as Paul Peart-Smith’s in NELSON. Dear lord, but the energy released is intense.

So has Project J2 really played God with God and cloned the Second Coming into existence? And, if so, will he fare any better than his progenitor at the hands of those who worshipped his deity-Dad? What really happened to that other little miracle, his genetically impossible twin sister snuck in by Sarah Epstein then drowned at birth? And what, ultimately, does Chris himself believe?

“I don’t care whose DNA I come from. The way I see it, I’m the bastard child of America’s runaway entertainment complex.”

Preach it.

SLH

Buy Punk Rock Jesus: Deluxe Edition h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Royal Blood h/c (£12-99, Random House / Vertical) by Alejandro Jodorowsky & Dongzi Lui.

“Hold your tongue, harlot!
“A king is above human judgement!
“He knows neither limits nor taboos.”

Blimmin’ heck, he’s not kidding. This king certainly knows none!

If I were to name those taboos here I could set off so many ranking alerts it’s not true! As to the limits, that’s not the first tongue he’s silenced. Permanently. There’s hands-on parenting and hands-on parenting: this is the wrong sort of hands-on parenting.

This is excruciating and bloody and nudey. I believe the Borgias were better behaved.

The painted art’s rich in detail and just what medievalists tend to love: great big battle scenes, stone throne rooms so vast you can almost hear them echo, and at one point the weather got so chilly on the page that I put on a jumper.

Here’s the publisher:

“A shocking tale of betrayal, lust and warring kingdoms, from acclaimed creator Alexander Jodorowsky! Wounded, betrayed and left for dead, King Alvar returns to his kingdom to regain his stolen throne. Hungry for revenge, Alvar finds himself in the middle of a bloody political game for power. To keep his throne he must crush his enemies who would destroy him with their machinations. But his own horrific appetites may prove his undoing!”

If punching wolves in the face fires you right up, then this one’s for you.

SLH

Buy Royal Blood h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Justice League 3000 vol 1 s/c (£12-99, DC) by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis & Howard Porter, others…

“So we remember… and we don’t. We’re the Justice League… but we’re not.
“Am I the only one who thinks this is the stupidest idea ever?”

Judging by how few people are reading this title in single-issue form, at Page 45 at least, apparently not, but you know what? Everyone else is wrong because this is just utterly hilarious off-the-wall fun. If you ever read Giffen and DeMatteis’ classic JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL back in the veritable day, then you should have had some idea what to expect frankly with quality writing, crackpot plotting and bonkers characterisation. On the other hand, given the relative sales strength, rightly or wrongly, of the other JUSTICE LEAGUE titles, it is perhaps not surprising yet another apparent variation on a theme is falling through the cracks a bit.

So… it is the year 3000 and the Justice League are long dead. So why are Clark, Bruce, Diana, Hal and Barry running around acting like callow imitations of themselves? Well, that might be because the Wonder Twins (no, not those two, thank goodness) have partially successfully cloned our super friends and brought them back from the dead, to fight the encroaching threat of the hive-mind known as The Convert and his ultra-powerful shock troops, the Five, who have taken over the Commonwealth of planets.

It’s a last desperate attempt by the scientists of Cadmus to stave off impending galactic domination, but it’s immediately clear these versions of the Justice League are not exactly like our chums of old. They may have a handful of the memories and some of their powers, sure, but they’ve none of the traumatic yet formative experiences / years of disciplined training, so consequently they’re like five squabbling egomaniacs who seem as likely to punch each other’s lights out as follow the mission parameters. Yet the strange thing is they all know they are acting like complete bickering idiots, but aren’t really sure why. When we finally get the real answer to why they aren’t perfect clones of the originals, it certainly suggests the boffins might have circumvented a few ethical boundaries in their haste to try and save the galaxy.

It’s a great concept, this, from Giffen and DeMatteis, which they’ve clearly thought through and is already providing me with as much fun as I got from the classic JLI material. I hope they manage to keep this title going for a while at least, as it is easily one of the most entertaining titles of DC’s current output, such as it is. Also, really nice art from Howard Porter, who I haven’t seen that much of since he worked on the moderately seminal run of JLA with Grant Morrison and Mark Waid.

JR

Buy Justice League 3000 vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Iron Fist: The Living Weapon vol 1: Rage s/c (£13-50, Marvel) by Kaare Andrews.

HAWKEYE’s Matt Fraction and David Aja are a hard act to follow. Their previous run on IRON FIST was a rejuvenating joy.

Fortunately one of comics’ finest chameleons, Kaare Andrews of SPIDER-MAN: REIGN, is no slouch.

He’s using at least four different visual styles so far including an exquisitely rendered black-and-white sequence like freeze-frame footage from a Bruce Lee film lit from the left by an industrial spotlight so throwing Daniel Rand’s body into stark silhouette, indelible on the east but eroded from the west.

He’s channelling Jim Steranko. With elements of SIN CITY there, yes.

“Two apaches descending hard and fast almost drown out the slide of nylon rope and chambered bullets. Almost.
“I draw them away from the girl. The apartments. Away from innocent lives.
“If they’re looking for something to destroy, how about an insurance company?
“I’m assuming they’re covered.”

Daniel Rand is tired and jaded. Numb. He is going through the motions.

He is being interviewed by a young lady “three steps out of a journalism degree, subsidized by Mommy and Daddy, enabled by a pretty face”. He is aware of the flattery yet prone to her interest not to mention her young, pretty face. So he tells of his childhood wrenched from home and into blizzardous mountains but seconds away from an avalanche by his father’s mad-eyed obsession with the mythical city of K’Un Lun. The expedition didn’t end well.

Now he’s in bed with her because, whatever, he’s earned it.

But whether sat opposite in the restaurant, brushing his teeth both before and afterwards or lying catatonic beneath Debbie / Barbie / Brenda or whatever her name is during sex, he remains robotic-eyed, close to drooling.

That is, until the helicopters strike.

I’d quote you the restaurant monologue in lieu of actual conversation which is hilarious in its relentlessness and slide towards size but please pick up the comic instead.

Once upon a time these satellite C-list series were mere filler while the big guns blazed well ahead. Now there seems so much invested in the five million Avengers titles to fuel its films’ fires that they’ve become self-indulgent, turgid and impenetrable. I prefer these far more accessible and individualistic series when given to creators of note, like LOKI and MS MARVEL and MOON KNIGHT – and of course YOUNG AVENGERS before them.

For more about Iron Fist himself, please see my review of THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST: COMPLETE COLLECTION VOL 1 and buy Fraction’s book: it’s a killer.

SLH

Buy Iron Fist: The Living Weapon vol 1: Rage s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Inhuman vol 1: Genesis s/c (£13-50, Marvel) by Charles Soule & Joe Madureira, Ryan Stegman.

In which a cloud of Terrigen Mist is sweeping across the world, changing humans into Inhumans.

“You really need to think about a change.”

A change, you say? Did you know there is a cloud of Terrigen Mist sweeping across the world, changing humans into Inhumans?

“Change. Pfft. Easy to say. Hard to do.”

Not when there’s a cloud of Terrigen Mist sweeping across the world, changing humans into Inhumans.

“I’m on a track, with no way off. I know it’s not what I’m supposed to be. I can feel something better for me, I just can’t find it.”

Don’t worry, it’s heading your way, sweeping across the world as a cloud of Terrigen mist. Look, it’s on the TV in the next panel, and it’ll be with you on the next page. That’s, like, so ironic.

Drivel.

As to the art: horrible. Especially the colours by Marte Gracia who has made this as impenetrably murky as ULTIMATES vol 3.

I recommend MS MARVEL. That series is brilliant.

SLH

Buy Inhuman vol 1: Genesis s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews as reviews. Neat, huh?

 

Here h/c (£25-00, Hamish Hamilton) by Richard McGuire

I Blame Grandma sketched-in (£4-99, self-published) by Joe Decie

The Cats Of Tanglewood Forest s/c (£5-99, Little Brown) by Charles De Lint & Charles Vess

Cochlea & Eustachia s/c (£14-99, Fantagraphics) by Hans Rickheit

Hansel & Gretel h/c (£12-99, Bloomsbury) by Neil Gaiman, The Brothers Grimm & Lorenzo Mattotti

Just The Tips h/c (£9-99, Image) by Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky & Chip Zdarsky

Marshal Law s/c (£22-50, DC) by Pat Mills & Kevin O’neill

New Lone Wolf & Cub vol 3 (£10-50, Dark Horse) by Kazuo Koike & Hideki Mori

The Shaolin Cowboy s/c (£14-99, Burlyman) by Geof Darrow

Slaine: Books Of Invasion vol 1 h/c (£13-99, Rebellion) by Pat Mills & Clint Langley

Spectrum vol 21 s/c (£25-99, Flesk) by various

Wasteland vol 10: Last Exit For The Lost (£10-99, Oni) by Antony Johnston & Brett Weldele, Sandy Jarrell, Omar Olivera, Christopher Mitten

Zenith Phase Two h/c (£18-99, Titan) by Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell

The New 52: Futures End vol 1 s/c (£29-99, DC) by Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen & Patrick Zircher, Ethan Van Sciver, various

Red Lanterns vol 5: Atrocities s/c (£14-99, DC) by Charles Soule, Antony Bedard & Alessandro Vitti, Yildiray Cinar, Miguel Angel Sepulveda, various

Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by L. Frank Baum, Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Thor God Of Thunder vol 3: The Accursed s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Nic Klein, Ron Garney, Das Pastoras

Wolverine: Origin h/c (£22-50, Marvel) by Paul Jenkins & Andy Kubert, Richard Isanove

Assassin’s Creed vol 5: El Cakr h/c (£8-99, Random House / Vertical) by Eric Corbeyran & Djillali Defali

News!

ITEM! Gary Phillips & Marc Laming’s graphic novel THE RINSE to become a TV series. This pleases me enormously, especially if Page 45 gets to keep its San Francisco branch. Seriously, Page 45 is in THE RINSE! In San Francisco. Ask me in-store and I’ll show you!

ITEM! Calvin & Hobbes doing a little animated dance! We love CALVIN & HOBBES. And stock it too!

ITEM! New interview with Bryan Talbot with loads of behind-the-scenes insights into the world of GRANDVILLE including the fourth book reviewed above!

ITEM! Angoulême 2015 prize nominees announced! Includes so many of my favourite graphic novels!

ITEM! THE NAO OF BROWN Competition Time Winner! A couple of weeks ago we asked you which ridiculous faux pas I managed (out of a career of so very many) when it came to Glyn Dillon’s THE NAO OF BROWN signing in our Georgian Room at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2014. The clue was I came clean in that very blog. This is 15 minutes prior to the signing:

Just as I’m getting very, very excited in walks this well-handsome man with a gentle demeanour and asks how we’re doing.

“Oh, tremendously well, cheers!” I croak. “I mean, look at this lavish room the festival has given us! We’ve a rotating cast of creators all sketching and selling away! We’ve all these jaw-dropping graphic novels the public are lapping up. And. And. In fifteen minutes time we have the great Glyn Dillon not just signing or sketching but painting in THE NAO OF BROWN!”

And this lovely, lovely oh lovely man says, “Who on earth do you think I am?”

The winner, drawn by ATOMIC SHEEP’s Sally-Jane Thompson, is the lovely oh lovely Leigh Hobson who now owns this sketched-in copy of THE NAO OF BROWN. Hurrah!


ITEM! “I’ve handed in scripts where instead of writing Hepzibah I typoed Hezbollah, which is a very different kind of X-men story where an entire political organization is sleeping with Cyclops’ Dad.” THE WICKED + THE DIVINE’s Kieron Gillen writes about what he sees as his scripts’ shortcomings, and is as entertaining as ever.

ITEM! One of comics’ finest-ever colour artists, Bettie Breitweiser (Ed Brubaker & Steve Epting’s period spy thriller VELVET and so much more), pays tribute to her right-hand man Eduardo Navarro, no longer with us.

ITEM! The ever-erudite Damien Walters exhorts science fiction authors to up their already considerable literary game to compete with video games. Brilliant article and overview.

ITEM! The Guardian First Book Prize goes to Colin Barrett’s Young Skins. In case you’ve forgotten it once went to comics’ own Chris Ware for the graphic novel JIMMY CORRIGAN. Oh yes!

ITEM! Loved GOLD STAR by John Martz – still available in print. John Allison calls it one of the best comics he’s recently and posted the link to read GOLD STAR online.

ITEM! Christmas Shopping At Page 45! Yes, I could do with updating the recommendations there but the key points still apply! Tell all your friends and family that, if they bring wish lists to the counter, we’ll find those graphic novels for them or – if they want fresh recommendations for out-of-the-blue surprises – we love, love, love providing shop-floor show-and-tells tailored to your taste!

Christmas shopping made easy and interactive at Page 45!

Someone write me a jingle.

– Stephen