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 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
