Smart art by Luke Ramsey; serious science-fiction from Mark Millar & Goran Parlov, Warren Ellis & Jason Howard, Garth Ennis & Facundo Percio; signed, unicorn comic from Kate Brown; Young Adult dinosaur adventure from THE PHOENIX COMIC; DARTH VADER by Gillen & Larroca and lots of Philippa Rice & Luke Pearson photos from our SOPPY signing underneath.
Trees vol 1 s/c (£10-99, Image) by Warren Ellis & Jason Howard.
“Nothing 
good grows in the shadow of a Tree.”
What an exquisitely beautiful and delicately beautiful book!
I don’t tend to associate science fiction with “delicately beautiful”. Beautiful, certainly, as Warren Ellis’ PLANETARY was from start to finish, but not “delicately” or “tenderly” and this, in places, is both.
The light outside Tian Chenglei’s bedroom, framed by the tall windows and heavy-hanging drape, is blinding, casting young Tian into silhouette as he sketches and leaving the carpet a half-lit puce. I love the rich gold and midday blue as Professor Luca Bongiorno sits outside a cafe in Cefalu under a Mediterranean sky. He too is sketching Trees. The nearest rises ever upwards, off the top of the page; the one farther off is so tall it fades into heavens.
Over and over Jason Howard nails the necessary sense of scale. These Trees are forever fading out at the top, often at the bottom as well, for they are that vast.
They landed ten years ago without warning, without contact, without anything at all other than their evident existence. Some appeared in remote regions like the Arctic; others appeared in cities as established as New York: that was pretty bad news for anyone underneath. Obviously world leaders reacted but nuclear and biochemical weapons ‘inactivated’.
And that was it. On the whole, for the moment, nothing has changed except their existence. Okay, there have been those floods of highly corrosive, green waste, discharged from giant, circular symbols in their ‘bark’.
But there’s certainly been no contact. As President Caleb Rahim of Somalia says of the behemoth straddling his own country and Puntland:
“If there is anything inside that Tree, it has proven over an entire decade that it doesn’t care what we do upon it.”
Its landing, however, did alter the natural water channels, and not in Somalia’s favour. Now Rahim intends to take back the advantage by using the Tree’s evident oblivion and one particular property which makes it unique: it is the only known Tree low enough to be accessible by helicopter. You can land on it. And if you can land on it…
Ellis presents us with four intercut perspectives: from Mogadishu, Somalia; from Cefalu, Sicily, where that Professor spies fire in the heart of a young local woman dissatisfied with her lover and his connections to a gang of local fascists; from the City Of Shu, Special Cultural Zone, to which young artist Tian Chenglei journeys and discovers a thrill and a freedom he’d never known in his rural village, and answers to sexuality he never thought he’d find; and then there are the latest developments by the Blindhail Station, North West Spitzbergen, on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
This is where you’ll get most of the verbal fencing you relish from Ellis, between the station’s scientists old and new. Whereas most members would love to leg it back home, veteran Marsh refuses to leave and now he’s found a very good reason to stay. The ice has become littered with tiny black flowers. Black flowers should not be growing up there.
“Maybe lichen. Not blooms. And even Arctic poppies turn to face the sun.”
These haven’t. And when inspected under a microscope. Hmmm… familiar…
“Those are wires, Sarah.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay then. Metal filaments… These petals have micrometer wires. They’re growing a mineral structure on a biological substrate.”
Once more Jason Howard makes it all monumentally beautiful and beautifully monumental. The flowers remind me of those newly discovered in Dash Shaw’s BODYWORLD, of which Ellis was a huge fan, which turned out to have properties beyond the psychotropic. I think you’ll find these will too.
They’re certainly pretty hardy!
Also, plenty has changed since the Trees’ landing. How could it not? The environment is one thing, human perspective and reaction’s another. The Professor will lecture later on.
SLH
Buy Trees vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here
The Unicorn And the Woodsman (£5-99, self-published) by Kate Brown.
All our copies 
signed by Kate Brown with love. Thank you, Kate!
This is a gorgeous comic with glorious production values: its pages are thicker than most cardstock covers and its cover is then thicker still.
Press your lips to its surface and it’s like kissing a cold cat’s thin ear – so silky smooth!
And that cover is divine on the surface, isn’t it? Its composition is majestic, immaculate, but pray look a little closer! No, it’s not what you think: I swear on the King James Bible that the Woodsman does not go all Chaucerian ‘Knights Tale’ on your ass: the unicorn will not be “tohewen and toshrede”d by a tree-felling maniac on malmsey.
But I’m afraid that FISH + CHOCOLATE’s Kate Brown has a habit of doing this: presenting her readers with what is seemingly bright, unsullied and pure then punching them in the guts with what truly lies in the hearts of men. Or women. Humans, basically.
There can be little more pure than a unicorn, living its traditionally tranquil, virgin and solitary life beneath a canopy of leaves through which low sunbeams shine, sylvan-softened, by the side of serpentine stream. And I do love the angles of light. Angles are important here.
But there is little less pure than the sub-human scum who hunt rhinos and elephants to extinction not for their life-sustaining meat which is left rotting by the wayside but for that toenail-dead, relatively small slice of horn erroneously deemed good for getting it up by Chinese quacks some several centuries ago. For the second time in my career I type the words “tiger cock” and it makes me very angry indeed.
So. Our unicorn is hunted for its singular, splendid horn and seeks shelter from a woodsman, begging his protection. That page is beat-perfect in its wide-eyed, submission-based composition, its ribbon-plea petition matching the mytho-steed’s stoop before being nailed down and tethered by an outstretched hoof.
“The woodsman,
of course,
knew just
what to do.”
Now, what I can promise you is this: different readers will react very differently indeed to the final three pages.
Let us discuss after class.
SLH
Buy The Unicorn And the Woodsman signed and read the Page 45 review here
Starlight: The Return Of Duke McQueen s/c (£10-99, Millarworld) by Mark Millar & Goran Parlov…
“They say a funeral 
is for those who are left behind, but I don’t really take much comfort from all this.
“I’ve lost my best friend, the mother of my boys, and my soulmate…
“Joanne is here in a wooden box and everyone is acting like it’s so damn normal.
“The preacher says she’s happier now and living up there in a better place. But how could it be better?
“We didn’t spend one night apart in thirty-eight years of marriage.
“How can it be paradise if she and I aren’t together anymore?”
I really did not believe that it was possible for Millar to produce a comic with more pathos than SUPERIOR, but I think he might have managed it, you know. There are so many heart strings getting tugged in the opening thirty or so pages, it’s practically a full violin concerto of melodrama! I don’t mind admitting there were a couple of moments when I had to wipe a discrete tear from the corner of my cynical old eye.
Our main character Duke McQueen (think a pension-age Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, basically, and if this gets made into a film I would dearly love Sam Jones to play the lead) safely retired from derring-do in his silver-haired dotage, mourning the recent loss of the love of his life, being gradually ever-more sidelined by his two busy adult sons, is feeling lost. Human beings are social creatures, and denied the contact with those we love, through time and distance, or mortality, it can be a rather lonely existence.
Duke seems to be coping well enough. After all you’d expect no less from such a renowned space hero, right? Except, except, his youthful exploits took place somewhere far, far away, and no one on the planet Earth ever believed a single word of it, aside from his late wife. Even two generations on, his notoriety and public shaming hasn’t been forgotten and has become something even young kids like to tease a crazy old man about…
“Uh, are you the guy that thinks he flew his plane to another planet?”
“What?”
“The guys were saying you got sucked through a wormhole and came home telling everyone you’d met real aliens. Is that true or are they just messing with me?”
“Yeah, I’m not sure if it was a wormhole, but yeah… I ended up somewhere else for a while and saw some crazy stuff. I just don’t like talking about it.”
“Is it true they put a probe in Uranus?”
“Get the hell outta my sight!”
“Sorry, Duke.”
“Relax buddy, I’m used to it.”
These days, he’s playing out his third and final act almost as if in a dream, for all he has are his memories. Those of his dear departed wife… and those of his time riding dragons and duelling space dictators.
When his two sons and their families aren’t able to come and visit him on the anniversary of their mother’s passing, inadvertently ruining the special meal which they have no idea Duke has spent days planning and preparing, it seems like he can’t feel any more alone in the world, or should that be universe? So when Duke’s house begins to shake as if a huge earthquake is starting, he’s as shocked as anyone when a spaceship decloaks and a young alien steps out pleading for his help. Yes, it’s time for Duke McQueen to saddle up and save the day once again! And keep your hankie handy for this is schmaltz at its finest!
This is superb work from Millar. I was gripped from the first page, not least because of Goran Parlov’s opening sequence set on an alien world which is pure Moebius, and that top-notch standard of art is continued throughout even once we’re (briefly) back on more mundane Earth, in Goran’s own inimitable style. But also because instantly you care about Duke and you desperately want something, anything, good or better yet exciting, to happen for this care-worn, gentle giant of a man. Better buckle up! A
JR
Buy Starlight: The Return Of Duke McQueen s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Intelligent Sentient h/c (£16-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by Luke Ramsey.
Art or silent 
story book? You decide.
There’s certainly plenty of evolution across the landscape pages along with an AKIRA-like black, spherical set-back. Objects like pyramids are picked up and played with, signals are sent and received.
Life. This book is teeming with life.
From a primordial, scab-scarlet soup, through the earliest of sea critters with all that cartilage going on, past the woolly mammoths and equally hairy humans to futuristic, circuit-board cities and a veritable alien invasion.
The penultimate page follows a final evolution of sorts, from the physical form to the free-roaming spirit.
There are patterns within patterns and most of those patterns are snakes. Or eels. Or lampreys. Or lungfish. I don’t really know which but evidently Luke loves that shape. Some of them are hidden, while some of them are staring you right in the face. Three of those faces belong to anthropomorphic snakes – one vaguely Egyptian, another perhaps Mayan, while the middle one has all kinds of fascist / Germanic shit going on – and these in turn are made up of a multitude of snakes in the same way Medusa’s hair had hissy fits. I know those are snakes: they have tongues.
Later on there are some actual landscapes in radically different styles and brush or nib thicknesses, sharing a sand, pink, cream, caramel and chocolate colour scheme. I don’t mean dairy milk chocolate, I mean that limp-ass cooking chocolate you used to get 35 years ago, surely now banned by international law. Think American only worse. I don’t know what the point to fit was: stopping step-sons from pilfering it from the pantry overnight? It worked!
Anyway, one of those landscapes is a network of Escher-like walkways I can easily see being a platform game, probably involving a precariously balanced silver sphere. So that’s my evening’s dream booked.
SLH
Buy Intelligent Sentient and read the Page 45 review here
The Pirates Of Pangaea Book 1 (£8-99, David Fickling Books) by Daniel Hartwell & Neill Cameron.
So that’s how 
you spell Pangaea: with three ‘a’s!
1717, and Miss Sophie Delacourt is on a tall ship sailing the Caribbean seas, bound for the fabled continent of Pangaea. Which, to be fair, is a pretty small continent about the size of an English county but with much less cricket and far more riding. It’s what’s being ridden that’s startling.
She’s to be delivered to the island’s governor, her guardian now that her parents are dead and you’d think once they’d reached port that they would be safe from pirates, but then you haven’t taken into account the dreaded Sea Of Green. This is no ordinary inland waterway but a vast plain covered in grass tall enough to hide any human. Or reptile. Think raptors. Think bigger.
Navigating the Sea Of Green, therefore, requires protection and after the very same ship they sailed in secures its sails it is hoisted – lock, stock and barrel – aboard the back of a cream and green, long-necked leviathan, a beast called Bessie, several times the size of the tall ship. She’s kept under control by Snuffman John, so-called because of the pouch of snuff that keeps the diplodocus docile.
High above the grasslands infested by so many predators they should surely be safe – but you wait until you catch a glimpse of Bessie’s opposite, obsidian number! You’ve never seen a dinosaur like it!
These vast panoramas occupying the top half a page at least once per chapter are the stars of the show, although Hartwell always keeps something in reserve for Cameron to capitalise on later. A mere three pages after the black beauty with its white Jolly Roger tats looms, snorting into view (look how the page lists under its weight and momentum!) you will see why narrow valleys aren’t always the best escape route!
It’s fast and it’s furious – it has to be when published weekly in little more than four-page instalments – and there’s far more to come like the secret of Raptor Rock and the quest for the Golden Skull hidden in a temple atop the Forbidden Isle. There’s much shivering of timbers (I think they’d be ejected from the Pirates Guild otherwise and given that it’s another Young Adult album from the pages of THE PHOENIX weekly – that hallmark of quality whence STAR CAT, GARY’S GARDEN, CORPSE TALK, LONG GONE DON, BUNNY VS MONKEY and the artist’s own HOW TO DRAW AWESOME COMICS – you’re guaranteed a good read.
So please do look under the cover which isn’t all that it could be. Normally I’m a big a fan of a matt finish as anyone, but here the bruised-peach and purple palette looks stodgy compared to the more sympathetically matched and much brighter, lighter colours sitting on a stock whose sheen adds enormously to the sense of space and fresh air.
SLH
Buy the Pirates Of Pangaea Book 1 and read the Page 45 review here
Hellblazer vol 10: In The Line Of Fire (£14-99, Vertigo) by Paul Jenkins & Sean Phillips with Al Davison.
“It’s a funny old game.”
Soccer, that is. Also, the one John Constantine cannot resist playing at almost every opportunity: poker. Not with cards, necessarily, but John the con is all about getting the measure of his opponent then bluffing or taunting his way to manipulative, slight-of-hand victory.
I mention the soccer because Al Davison draws that one; the rest is FATALE and CRIMINAL’s Sean Phillips walking the high wire without a safety net and wobbling not once. By which I mean he drew straight into inks, no pencils at all and the result is raw, fresh and thrilling. Yes, there are demons but most of the real horror in HELLBLAZER is human: what we do to each other for political gain, personal pleasure or from careless, callous expediency. This results in more interior monologue and casual conversation than almost any other comic, so you bet watching John wince under sunlight or slip in and out of the shadows had better be thrilling.
But you don’t need a review of a tenth HELLBLAZER volume, do you? You‘re either reading this avidly by now or, if you’re about to begin, you‘ll do so with HELLBLAZER VOL 1: ORIGINAL SINS where I’ve provided everything you need to know to get you hooked, line and sinker.
Reprints #97 to #107.
Gratuitous plug for THE ART OF SEAN PHILLIPS because I’m contractually obliged.
I’m really not.
Here’s a link direct to Sean’s site for the process involved in this cover. Ta-da! http://theartofseanphillips.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/hellblazer.html
SLH
Buy Hellblazer vol 10: In The Line of Fire and read the Page 45 review here
Caliban s/c (£14-99, Avatar) by Garth Ennis & Facundo Percio.
Love the 
cover which positively glows and informs you immediately that you’re in OCEAN and ‘Alien’ territory. In space no one can hear you seriously lose your shit. Which is what is about to happen.
The Caliban is a mining ship navigating warpspace with a small, somewhat fractious crew of fully conscious officers.
“The miners sleep down below along with the cargo. That’s so they don’t spend too long gazing at infinity that they step outside to get a better look at it.”
There’s an officious, unresponsive navigator called Karien who looks a lot like Hitler minus the Charlie Chaplin moustache; a man named McCartney who doesn’t respond well to officiousness; a timid and doting young man called Canny; sharp-tongued San, the woman who can (and they’ll be bloody grateful for that later on), and finally our Nomi the note-maker.
“One hundred nineteen planets and moons, and not one habitable. Suits of rebreathers, every time. Life: forget it. An orange mould they found on an asteroid. Some kind of mollusc on somebody’s moon, that lives inside its own excrement.
“So it’s stations, ships, recycled air. Fake light. Suns too bright to look at. Your body adapting in ways you don’t dwell on. Stillborn things that go straight in the trash.
“But all those dead rocks have yielded up a ton of treasure. Ore and oil and gas and water. The megatonnage is immense: you see the figures on a screen and the zeroes just go on forever.
“And because almost no one wants to live out here, everything goes back to feed the industries on earth. Which, last time I saw it, looked like a tumour breathing through a smokestack.”
Oh wait, I forgot the Captain. We haven’t seen him. He’s been too busy “banging the shit out of his executive officer”. We haven’t met the executive officer, either, who could be a bloke for all we know. One doesn’t like to presume.
Suddenly – right out of nowhere and whilst still in warpspace where they should be intangible – the Caliban fuses with a much bigger and much, much older vessel. Imagine a forest suddenly trying to occupy the same space as your living room, tree trunks growing out of your fireplace, twigs threading through your lightshade and fusing with the ceiling… Someone’s going to get splinters at the very least.
So it is aboard the Caliban: some of the alien craft’s floors, walls and ceilings have attempted to occupy the same space as the Caliban’s crew – and succeeded. It’s pretty messy.
The Caliban’s lost its miners, vented into the void, and it’s also lost its engines. Since the alien vessel held no oxygen before impact, every time they open a hatch into an alien section the Caliban is losing its own. And speaking of losing it, you would too if you found what the remaining officers have on the other side of those airlocks. Yet venture they must for their emergency signal will take a month to reach their nearest point of civilisation and the only chance they have of restoring power to the Caliban is to link up with the aliens’ engines and pray that their systems are compatible enough that they can get their computers talking to each other.
They’d stand a much better chance if they had our Jonathan and Dominique on board
Now, what happened to the alien vessel’s crew, do you think…?
I can promise you grim and grizzly. Although Facundo Percio (ANNA MERCURY, FASHION BEAST) is very much an artist representative of the Avatar style, he does have an eye for the grotesque including body parts which bend in places they shouldn’t. Because someone or something has bent them. In places they shouldn’t. Repeatedly. Out of curiosity.
See, that’s the big difference between this and ‘Alien’ in which all the creature craved was to thrive: to kill to grow to survive. And then kill some more, because yum. The entity in question here is much more interested in gathering information and is prepared to borrow whatever it needs to do so, including the ship’s crew.
I never liked Karien anyway.
SLH
Buy Caliban and read the Page 45 review here
Darth Vader #1 (£3-99, Marvel) by Kieron Gillen & Salvador Larroca…
“The Darth to the Vader
Flip over the crossfader
I’ll serenade you with a bag of space raiders
Or Walkers or Smiths or maybe even quavers.”
You Knows I Love You Baby – Goldie Lookin Chain
I have always seriously wanted to believe that the various buttons and LEDs on Darth Vader’s chest activated breakbeat samples and some different vocoder options, perhaps a Cornish accent, rather than just being some ridiculously vulnerable life support system. I have my suspicions he would be a bit of a dad dancer, mind you, though you never know, he might well be able to moonwalk across the road, always looking both ways first, of course, obeying the Green Cross Code. If anyone is going to unveil the mysteries of Darth’s lighter side, it’s going to be Kieron Gillen, I feel.
Some of my favourite sequences in the seventies Star Wars run of comics featured the original man in black throwing his telekinetic weight around and administering virtual Chinese burns to the throats of his cowering lackeys. Even as five-year-olds playing Star Wars in the playground for months afterwards, no one minded being Darth, simply because he was as cool as fuck. Even my little three-year-old nutjob spotted the cover of this issue at home and commented, “Who’s that? He’s not a goodie, is he? I like his mask, though.”
Having recently had a revelatory conversation with said nutjob regarding the Maleficent film, how it was possible for someone to start off being nice but end up a baddie due to unfortunate things happening to them, I therefore explained that this was the same scenario. “But is he good again in the end, like Maleficent?” was the next question, which I knew full well was coming. When I said that indeed, there was a happy ending and Darth helps save the day, all was well in the nutjob’s world.
We can perhaps leave the irredeemable villains of the universe like Ming the Merciless for a little while yet, I think, and thus we moved on to the merits of a lightsabre versus a regular sword… “I bet it’s easier to cut someone’s head off with a lightsabre than a sword, isn’t it daddy?” Truly, I feel the moment of sitting down and watching Star Wars IV together is edging ever nearer…
Anyway, I really enjoyed this first issue: Kieron does an excellent job of showing Darth does have his own mind and isn’t just the Emperor’s preferred implement of inducing blunt Force trauma. In fact, it’s what the Emperor is getting up to behind his back which is intriguing our Lord of Sith, believing as he did that he was the Emperor’s most trusted and valuable lieutenant. Given the dressing down and demotion he’s just received, being instructed to start taking orders from Baron Tagge (excellent – he was one of my favourite characters in the original run), he decides he needs to chalk up something in the win column, and soon. Cue a little friendly lightsabre-twirling, telekinetic throat-tickling chat with Jabba The Hut to engage the services of a certain green-helmeted bounty hunter whom he tasks with tracking down the naughty young master Skywalker. That should set the chest lights flashing, I reckon.
Great opener with nice art from Salvador Larroca which I enjoyed rather more than the first couple of issues of the main STAR WARS title itself.
JR
Buy Darth Vader #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?
Umbral vol 2: The Dark Path s/c (£10-99, Image) by Antony Johnston & Christopher Mitten
Hepatic Portal (£5-00) by Emix Regulus
Dangeritis (£7-99) by Robert Ball
Drama (£8-99, Scolastic) by Raina Telgemeier
Criminal vol 2: Lawless s/c (£10-99, Image) by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal vol 1: Creation Myths s/c (£10-99, Archaia) by Brian Holguin, Brian Froud & Alex Sheikman, Lizzy John
Princess Decomposia & Count Spatula (£10-99, FirstSecond) by Andi Watson
Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen (£14-99, Knockabout) by Dylan Horrocks
Uber vol 3 s/c (£14-99, Avatar) by Kieron Gillen & Daniel Gete, Gabriel Andrade
Constantine vol 3: The Voice In The Fire s/c (£10-99, DC) by Ray Fawkes & various
Damian: Son Of Batman s/c (£12-99, DC) by Grant Morrison & Andy Kubert
Amazing Spider-Man: Who Am I? h/c (£18-99, Marvel) by Joshua Hale Fialkov & Juan Bobillo
Axis: Carnage And Hobgoblin s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Kevin Shinick, Rick Spears & Javier Rodriguez, German Peralta
Civil War Prelude: New Warriors s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Zeb Wells & Skottie Young
Daredevil vol 2 West Case Scenario s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Mark Waid & Javier Rodriguez, Chris Samnee
Spider-Man 2099 vol 1: Out Of Time (UK Edition) s/c (£10-99, Marvel) by Peter David & Will Sliney
The Emerald City Of Oz s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young
Uncanny X-Men vol 3: The Good, The Bad And The Inhuman s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Chris Bachalo, Kris Anka
Barakamon vol 1 (£10-99, Yen Press) by Satsuki Yoshino
Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire vol 2 (£8-99, Viz) by Naoki Serizawa
News!
ITEM! The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) announces first of many, many international guests for 2015: Darywn Cooke I’ve seen LICAF’s Canadian line-up and that alone will have you squealing. Hint: try Googling “Canadian Cartoonist”. Recommend following @comicartfest on Twitter right now because THIS WEEK. Because THIS week!
ITEM! I count 50 UK Comicbook Conventions for 2015 listed on this website! Well, 49 conventions and a festival – LICAF – which is a very different beast altogether. Still, that is waaaaaay too many to be remotely sustainable (can you spell “diluted attendance”?) and I would creators, publishers, retailers and readers to be highly selective as to which they attend. We don’t even have anything to do with that Nottingham effort – Page 45 is all the Nottingham-based comicbook convention you need! – for we are exclusive to The Lakes International Comic Art Festival this and every year instead.
ITEM! John O’Farrell welcomes Newzoids, ITV’s newly announced puppet-based, socio-political satire while recalling – and warning off comparisons to – Spitting Image. I’m in!
ITEM! Marian Churchland writes about getting yourself back into the artistic saddle after some time away, often following bouts of depression. Marian was responsible for the graphic novel BEAST which was almost patronage and female vulnerability amongst many other things, and reminded one how bloody difficult it was for women during the Italian Renaissance to find materials let alone tutorials and patronage. Fun fact: the film rights were optioned a few years ago by someone who shopped with us and I was on the steering committee for its artistic development. Shame that never came off.
ITEM! Page 45 Shop Floor on Saturday 14th February. Young chancer to me:
“Can you do this graphic novel for £10?”
“Depends. What does the price say?”
“£14-99.”
“Nope.”
“What can you do it for?”
“Take a wild fucking guess.”
ITEM! Speaking of Valentine’s Day, more Jodie Paterson cards like these on our website went down a treat and you may still find a few copies on sale in the shop. Jodie hasn’t said as much, but I suspect they were all inspired directly by me.
ITEM! Love to all who came to our SOPPY signing with Philippa Rice and Luke Pearson! Philippa’s Mum came – to her first-ever signing! – and we had so many freebies to give away thanks to Lisa Gooding at Square Peg and Emma O’Donovan at Flying Eye.
Make sure you’re here for Scott McCloud’s signing at Page 45 on Sunday March 8th, 2pm to 4pm!
At the time of typing we have copies of both SOPPY and HILDA sketched in but not many, so please enquire!
Here, have some photos! Awww!
– Stephen
