Terry Moore, Philippa Rice, Eleanor Davis, Hannah Berry, Devin Grayson, Sean Phillips, John Bolton, Koren Shadmi, David Kushner, Maggie Thrash!
We’ve two graphic novels celebrating the human imagination’s capacity for shared and sustained, interactive world building in games.
Livestock (£16-99, Jonathan Cape) by Hannah Berry.
Comes with free, 
signed, limited edition bookplate exclusive to Page 45!
Meet Clementine Darling, up for a fourth consecutive victory as Best Female Singer and Political Spokesperson. It’s a single award.
“Well done, Clementine!”
“Thank you, I’m literally beside myself!”
Hannah Berry is back with the work of her career, a blisteringly funny, fiercely inventive and scathing socio-political satire which doesn’t content itself with blasting the blithe disingenuousness of politicians and pop stars – both increasingly vapid and transparent in their self-serving mendacity – but focuses its ire instead on their equally unprincipled co-conspirators: their spin-doctors who here have seen fit to combine their calculating machinations in a coordinated affront on the public’s intelligence in order to benefit both parties and bury what little remains of the truth.
This is the core conceit and it works all too well: firstly, that the same PR agency could be as adept at manufacturing long-term, soap-opera strategies for celebutards as for political parties and their inept ministers; secondly that those self-same sleights of hand might be mutually beneficial.
“Do you know Devon Ayre?”
“From Das Booty?”
“No. Devon Ayre was with Daynjaryuz when they released Undress 2 Impress. He went out with Coral?”
“Right, right – that big break-up during the energy contract scandal!”
“Yes. Him. Please let Clementine know that she’s going out with him now.”
Clementine is sitting in the same limo, oblivious to her latest life choice, dutifully listening on headphones instead to a new song as instructed by PR guru Paul Rourke.
“I like it a lot!”
“What’s that, Clem?”
“I like the song a lot!”
“Oh good! That’s your next single, to be released next month. Ties in with the passing of the new Human Rights Act. Selina, Pen, if you could get this one to memorise the words ready to film the music video on Thursday thanks.”
*click*
“Guess what, Clementine! Do you know Devon Ayre?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, he’s going to be your new boyfriend.”
Clementine’s blank, cheery face flickers not one jot. Instead she slurps on a cartoon of pineapple juice. She wanted apples but was persuaded that pineapple was like apple. Happily so.
That *slurp* is far from accidental, reminding us of Clementine’s suggestibility, susceptibility, malleability, and Berry plays each episode of this deviously entwined distract-athon with just such deftly edited precision.
For that’s what this is: one huge, elaborately orchestrated distraction from any real news vital for an informed electorate, bumping it swiftly from the front-feed of ‘What’s Trending’ with vacuous, superficial headline-grabbing click-bait.
The ‘What’s Trending’ internet front page is reprised throughout, with all its corporate sponsorship, forming a constantly refreshed narrative of its own, charting the success of their meticulously scheduled shenanigans against the downward trend of any unfortunate, unforeseen hiccups which might blip briefly to the radar’s surface.
Clementine’s entire career as a pop-star – and “author” of best-selling autobiography – is but a means to that specific end so that she’s in the right place at the right time, whether it’s yet another vacuous Daytime TV husband-and-wife chat show masquerading as news and so satiating what little demand there is for it still, a spot on OMFGTV or an actual Newsnight interrogation where she can do the most damage possible.
Although let’s not forget that Clem’s trajectory is in itself highly lucrative, especially when it’s sent on a crash-collision course with that of her arch-rival Coral whom we first see on ‘What’s Trending’ with a new hairstyle / look in order to launch her new novel. Here’s Coral basking in public applause at that book launch, with a live Twitter-feed behind her:
“It’s always been my dream to write a book, and now after many days of harduous work I can finally cross it off my list!”
It’s a shame then that after so many – or at least several – days’ work, Coral should find her spotlight at risk of being stolen by Clem’s unexpected materialisation next to her own display of autobiographical best-selling success. No matter, time for a bit of improv.
“Because the thing is, some people are just not talented enough to write a book – anyone can write an autobiography, because they can just remember what they did and write about all that – and if they can’t remember things, they can pretend to be exciting by stealing other people’s ex-boyfriends…”
That would be Devon Ayre, yes.
Do you realise the two ladies share the same publicist? Clem and Coral do: they’re just too dim to comprehend they’re being played against each other.
This is only Round One. The carefully choreographed bouts will become increasingly brutal.
The Twitter feed, by the way, is well worth scrutinising! It’s that sort of graphic novel: craftily constructed with multiple, layered threads, each precisely dovetailed, and so dense in detail if you care to look closely enough. There are dozens of crowd scenes among which you might recognise more than a few comics-related reprobates. Hannah Berry is quite the accomplished portrait artist!
I love that however beautiful each antagonist might be (and they are all antagonists – there’s more antagonism going down in here than at a similarly staged WWF tournament), they still all look toad-like, with big mouths and squat faces, as if they’ve drained an entire of pond full of Botox.
The colours are sickly rather than bright and primary – that would have been far too obvious – for this whole sordid affair is designed to make you feel slightly queasy, and we haven’t even approached the issue of the day which is the government’s back-door endorsement of human cloning… to the private sector.
And what is the primary goal of the private sector? Is it quality control, due diligence or commitment to ethical standards? It is not. The primary goal of every private sector company is to make money.
Now, where do you think the title LIVESTOCK comes in?
If lack of scrutiny gets your goat then this will have you chewing your own leather leash off.
LIVESTOCK could not be better timed given ex-‘reality’-TV star Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades successfully drowning his destruction of healthcare, women’s rights, civil rights and environmental sanity for the sake of big-business dollars as well as masking so many of his own private and public missteps. But let’s remember that this graphic novel was written many moons ago, Berry astutely observing the fabrications for what they were then, why they were being deployed by a complicit media, why they were so swiftly gobbled up by a public more likely to vote on Britain’s Been Brainwashed than during actual elections, and presciently predicting the path which would lead to this godawful excuse for a culpably cultivated future.
But if you think Trump’s bad, wait for beleaguered MP Duncan Frears and his beloved Border Collie during a doorstep interview that threatens to unveil a particularly pertinent truth and so unravel his career.
You cannot actually imagine.
Why don’t we play this review out with Clementine’s latest pop video? I’ve seen them do that on Newsnight. In it Clementine articulates the current geopolitical climate with grave concern for its most vulnerable victims and – in case you can’t quite discern the lyrics – the director has chosen to emphasise their eloquence by superimposing them artfully around the most prominent issues at hand.
Priorities are important.
Oh wait, here’s that exclusive signed Page 45 bookplate I mentioned.
Genius!
SLH
Buy Livestock and read the Page 45 review here
User h/c (£26-99, Image) by Devin Grayson & Sean Phillips, John Bolton.
“The more 
I think about it, the less reality has to recommend it.”
Originally published in 2001, this comic was so clever, accurate, eloquent and way ahead of its time.
It speaks of gender identity, sexuality, the escapist lure of the internet, online addiction, and the dangers of substituting virtual priorities for real-life interaction to the point of culpable negligence.
By the by, it also predicted how many of us would arrive bleary-eyed and outrageously late for work following an obsessive all-night session thumb-thumping away on video games.
But here, vitally, Devin Grayson is dealing with the creative capacity of the human imagination and the immersive power of stories and words, for Megan’s obsession is with text-only live action role playing. It delves far deeper than you might anticipate and, as a graphic novel, it comes with its own illusions so mesmerising that they are water-tight.
For a start, although Sean Phillips’s soft, shiny, largely monochromatic, photo-realistic art with its subtle deployment of colour charts Megan’s real-life struggles outside of the online arena… every single richly hued, neon-bright, fantastical image created by John Bolton is a complete sleight-of-hand. It’s a sleight-of-hand that has become even more successful since the ascent of massively multiplayer online role playing games with their visual components because we are used to seeing these avatars interact with each other on the screens, but every single one of these images lies only in Megan’s head.
When, therefore, we come to the first key climax at the end of chapter one, Megan’s wide-eyed “Oh shit…” shock – graceful fingers hovering uncertainly over the keyboards – is a reaction not to the previous “on-screen” painting by Bolton or indeed the subsequent afterglow which we see before us, but to the text which has conjured that startling image in her mind.
I have no idea whether Sean Phillips even had access to that image: one should not presume; each artist is more likely to have been working independently, concurrently, from script alone. Regardless, that moment once more proves what an extraordinarily accomplished character actor Sean Phillips is, and if Phillips couldn’t see it, then that goes double.
Throughout the graphic novel Phillips nails those bleary eyes, as well as Megan’s mood-swings. These become increasingly dramatic as the emotional pressures ramp up both inside and outside her virtual existence, the former’s grip growing increasingly fierce and compelling while the latter is left to fall apart as reality begins to escape her grasp, Megan begins to make various levels of contact in out-of-character conditions and then loses the plot in so many more ways than one.
“I can no longer tell if there’s something wrong with the world or something wrong with me,” she concedes in a moment of rare lucidity before, “Or if that makes any difference.”
I don’t want to give too much away, but online Megan has assumed the guise of Sir Guillaume De La Coeur, a paladin who, Megan decides, is willingly in thrall to his adopted lord and mistress and who considers honour of paramount importance. In her mind, Sir Guillaume is a young, buff, blue-skinned beau who begins to fall in love with his master – a development which repels that master’s real-life, out-of-character counterpart – and in lust with his best friend Lieutenant McCraven, also male and played by his OOC counterpart with a charming Celtic twang. Now that is received far more readily.
But an outsider calling herself Rose Violette, not part of the guild, had taken such a shine to Sir Guillaume that, err, well, and he in return courted her back. The next two sentences, when you stop to analyse them properly, are the perfect example of why I consider this the work of Devin Grayson’s career to date.
“He is sincere. I made sure of it.”
Seriously.
“And it’s better than real. It’s her dream come true.”
Will Megan try to tread softly lest she tread upon those dreams? She will not.
When “Rose” becomes too clingy for Megan’s comfort, Meg finds herself becoming as angry as her Dad, and voices that anger bluntly, brutally and in equally chauvinistic terms.
This is what I meant about gender identity for all the while Grayson – through having Megan adopting a gender which isn’t her own – has encouraged you to wonder who else may not be who they seem away from the keyboard. And by “delves far deeper than you might anticipate”, you will not believe the car crashes which the subsequent, extended, out-of-character interactions (which are blithely deceptive on Megan’s part) begin to catalyse.
“I no longer think that it’s just a matter of people not caring who you really are.
“I think we don’t even know how to be who we really are.”
Well, quite.
So what initially drove Megan so fervently into this online community?
With her home life disintegrating in the wake of her mother’s departure, leaving her feckless father to wilfully ignore his other daughter’s unsuccessful attempts to find off the unwanted sexual advances of his own supposed best friend (a silence Meg is complicit in), she found herself ignored and all but invisible except when asked to buy toothpaste.
Moreover at work she was growing disillusioned not only with importance attached to the bland stats of customer satisfaction surveys, but to the disingenuous compromise of allowing a drug’s owner to fund a survey as to its efficacy.
By contrast to all this, as soon as she takes her first tentative steps into this virtual world, Megan is both noticed and embraced. Instead of being rebuked or rebuffed for her naivety, she is kindly and patiently educated during OCC asides, and she discovers a liberation in being who she wants to be while appreciating a structure she find easier to adhere to within this fictitious environment than dealing with the chaos without, which she is quick to abandon as beyond her control. Additionally, in place of dry statistics, Megan immediately starts relishing not just the fantasy but the creativity which is poured into such a sustained, shared narrative.
Grayson finds so much to commend in this remarkable communal endeavour: she is, after all, a wordsmith herself and her script is as immersive as the virtual, text-based experience she is conjuring.
Let us not forget that not everyone is as predisposed as Megan to abandon their sense of perspective.
The moment which I remembered most vividly from my first encounter with this work some sixteen years ago was when Megan – who had already begun subconsciously adopting the French language she employed in character – begins hysterically screaming “LOLOLOLOLOL!” as if having some sort of seizure.
That wouldn’t work in film, but printed, in this medium, it’s a triumph.
There’s plenty more where that came from, along with a great deal of terminology and shorthand, new then, but which remains with us today even more prevalently deployed in text-messaging and on social media.
Speaking of that which endures, I leave you with these pithy truths which I grant you aren’t quite so absolute in the age of the PS4 controller, but still:
“Live one’s life so that it’s worthy of respect and honour by all…
“And don’t eat anything at the keyboard that requires more than one hand.”
SLH
Buy User h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Motor Girl vol 1: Real Life (£14-50, Abstract Studios) by Terry Moore.
“Samantha?
“Are you okay?”
So you think you know what to expect from this comic.
It’s a burlesque starring a hyperactive desert-based, junkyard mechanic who’s tied at the hip to an anthropomorphic wry, dry mountain gorilla who sasses and back-chats, right? And that’s a diminutive, comedy, green alien on the cover, so you’re in for those too?
Hmmm…
No, that’s okay, you’re not wrong: they’re all here, present and correct, along with Terry’s persistent, consistent campaign against cretins who use cell phones whilst driving, which is deadly and ever so slightly illegal.
But is that really all you’d expect from the creator of RACHEL RISING, STRANGERS IN PARADISE and ECHO? The man who’s made a career out of juxtaposing comedy with hard-hitting trauma? All it takes is a single, early, un-signposted panel to suggest that you’re in for a lot more than you first bargained for. This would fit comfortably on Page 45’s Mental Health Awareness counter: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
“What happened here?”
“Iraqi prison.”
“You were in the military?”
“Marines.”
“I was in the navy. Six years. Did you suffer any head injuries?”
“I guess. They hit me every day for ten months.”
Sam’s recurring headaches are excruciating, and when you finally witness the silent flashback, it will flatten you.
“Is that where you got these scars on the back of your scalp?”
“I suppose. They liked to work the backside so the front looked okay on camera. Y’know… for NATO.”
“Did you receive medical attention after captivity?”
“Nine weeks in the hospital, a year of rehab.”
It wasn’t enough.
“That’s a lot to go through alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. I was never alone.”
Now former Sergeant Samantha Locklear works virtually alone in a desert junkyard owned by ancient but far from frail Libby who is determined Sam should at least wear a hat and shades. It’s almost unbearably hot, but its isolation and practical purpose provides Sam with the stability she needs not to stay sane, but to survive.
Walking that tightrope alongside her is Mike the mountain gorilla, her constant companion who is more than just a figment of Sam’s imagination, but a coping mechanism, a projection she knows isn’t real. Mike, of course, is a straight male gorilla: infer from that what you will.
Samantha’s so skilled she can identify any car and its condition by the sound of its engine. Her ideal career would have been a racing car driver.
“People actually pay you to go to cities all round the world and drive fast. What could be better?”
“Lying in a hammock by the beach, beer on ice, fish on the grill… watching the girls play volleyball.”
“That was a rhetorical question.”
Yes, but you answered it anyway, Sam!
“They ask me to join in.”
“You done?”
“But I can’t, see?” ‘Cause I’m there with Scarlett Johnasson… and she gets jellyyyy…”
“Omigod, shut up.”
“And they start wrasslinnn…”
It’s all so subtly written.
So if Mike isn’t real, what about the UFO and the comedy green aliens who crash-land on the doorstep? Only Sam and Mike see those, late at night, fixing up their stereotypical flying-saucer’s engine, to be thanked by an almighty embrace, the alien’s antennae bending into the shape of a heart, his oil-stained hands planted firmly on Sam’s boxer-shorted buttocks. The stain’s still there in the morning, as plain as plain can be… unless Sam’s imagining that too?
On that, I will stay schtum, but there has to be some reason why Mr Walden is prepared to pay a ridiculous sum of money to purchase the land, then up the ante with intimidation. Nice visual reference to Hergé’s TINTIN: DESTINATION MOON.
I love that Libby, the direct, gum-flapping old-age pensioner is even less likely to “do” intimidation than Sam; that she understands Sam’s needs and treats her like a daughter. She won’t sell unless Sam’s ready to move on, and she isn’t. She has a family that worries about her, but she’s simply not ready.
I can hear Libby’s “Ooo dogey!” drawl distinctly in my head which, weirdly enough, I am positive is partly due to the cartooning.
As well as wearing a hat and shades, Libby’s also determined that Sam, to stave off dehydration, should drink more.
“DRINK!” Drink or you’re going straight to bed with no supper!
“That’s what Momma used to say, she could really bring the pain.
“Now I drink a Martini every day at five…
“And toast to Momma.”
So yes, new shorter-form series which is far from predictable before Terry returns to STRANGERS IN PARADISE – hooray! – starring a hyperactive, desert-based, junkyard mechanic, a highly sardonic anthropomorphic mountain gorilla, diminutive, comedy, green aliens, a sympathetic landlord and a lot less sympathetic, land-grabbing mystery man.
Fab, flapping hair once flying about on a quad bike, suitably matted and ill-conditioned when not, superb use of grey tones at night, and there’s an exquisite slow-motion scene in which a certain party’s launch through the air is virtually halted as Sam and Mike weigh up the situation calmly, unhurriedly, before Sam demonstrates quite ably why ex-Marines don’t need to carry firearms.
I think TANK GIRL fans would love this.
SLH
Buy Motor Girl vol 1: Real Life and read the Page 45 review here
You & A Bike & A Road (£10-99, Koyama Press) by Eleanor Davis.
“I like going
further than we tell ourselves is possible.”
I used to love country bike rides: three or four miles down verdant Cheshire country roads to feast with a friend on sandwiches and sugary, fizzy pop like Dandelion & Burdock high up on the hill at Beeston Castle; three of four miles back again. Lovely!
Here Eleanor gets on the bike which her Dad’s just built for her and cycles across America from her parents’ house in Tucson, Arizona towards her own home… in Athens, Georgia. She’s drawn you a little map: it’s basically coast to bloody coast!
Between 15 and 50 miles she manages each day depending on the state of her knees and which way the wind’s blowing (against you is a ‘mare), and she doesn’t stop for 56 days. Extraordinary.
Also exceptional: this entire graphic memoire. I think that’s what the trendy people are calling autobiographical comics these days.
But it is! Davis has some remarkable encounters. Mostly they’re acts of spontaneous generosity we should all aspire to: an invitation to join a camping family eating a catfish they’d just caught; water from Mexico border patrols (they’re not always so kind: you’ll see what I mean when you meet the man in the canal); and on Day 21 she nearly gives in to what has become extreme pain in her knees by then, which catalyses intense grief and depression, but the bloke in the bike shop trained as a therapist, helps her through it, calls a doctor friend, recommends a sports masseuse then finds her a couple to stay with.
“Brian says you’re having vegetable soup for dinner!”
It’s all so thoroughly inspiring, as is Davis’ pencil art which conveys every ounce of gratitude as well as the pain, sweat, exhaustion but also elation at being surrounded on all sides by horizon or thrusting forward through “tunnels of green”.
Her body forms are beautiful: such enormous weight from such few lines as punters loom large over a billiard table or Eleanor herself sets up her tent at dusk then sits up inside, almost filling the bright, cosy space while outside the night and unknown are contrasted in a dense, graphite darkness which radiates, as might light. On both pages she makes superb use of the shape of her legs, knees and thighs in body-hugging black lycra, while the strength of her shoulders then the curve of her arms freed from a white singlet vest are thrillingly physical. That her head is drawn so much smaller only adds to the sense of scale.
“While you are setting up your tent anything can get you.
“Inside your tent you are safe.”
She stares out at us from inside that tent with her tiny head and an expression which seems to imply the qualifying addendum, “arguably”.
The trees in the wood put me in mind of those so elegantly delineated by Isabelle Arsenault in JANE, THE FOX & ME. In their own way those pages are as lush as the double-sided landscape cover extended through its French flaps, but then anyone who’s read Davis’ HOW TO BE HAPPY or LIBBY’S DAD knows that she is a master of many mediums and a vast array of disparate styles.
Apart from exceptional portraiture on Day 57’s ever so moving encounter, few other pages are as detailed as that but I sense that Davis drew this on the road – or at least on its various verges – in a series of diary entries. I could be entirely wrong. They all do the trick, though: at no point do you not sense that you are there alongside her as she crosses different terrains, spying a mountain ahead in the distance, moving towards it, “Now you’re climbing it” before “Now you’re over it” then leaving it far behind. Looking ever forward, “Now it’s gone”.
There are many dodgy moments like crossing an almightily high, exposed bridge with no room for manoeuvre should a bludgeoning jugger-bugger come thundering up behind her. Anything towards her at the same time…? Jeepers! Plus let us not forget that Davis is travelling alone (though often claims to be with her husband for intuitively understood safety’s sake) and although she does use more RV Parks and motels than she would have liked, sometimes an invitation to use a trailer or official camping ground otherwise deserted are wisely declined.
Occasionally Davis grows frustrated and angry at herself (I fail to see why, but then I fail to see why I sometimes do the same when I later consider the general state of play rationally), then once back on her bike repudiates herself:
“Eleanor, you would never use that language with someone else so please don’t use it on yourself.”
Excellent advice! It was pretty fruity.
“But by the afternoon I’m skimming through streams in hysterics.”
What I hope to convey here is that this is more than just a read and beautiful thing to behold: it is an experience. It is an experience we are so lucky to share without the considerable inconvenience of getting our collagen clapped out.
I leave you, however, with a sense of context candidly expressed early on which cannot help but inform your journey together, and it engenders an additional element of already excellent empathy as Eleanor pedals on.
““What made you decide to do this trip?” people ask.
“I say:
““My husband and I want a baby so I figure I either do this now or wait 20 years.
“Or
““My Dad built me this bike and I hate boxing and shipping bikes so I decided to just ride it home!”
“I don’t say:
““I was having trouble with wanting to be alive. But I feel good when I’m bicycling”.
“But that is also true.”
SLH
Buy You & A Bike & A Road and read the Page 45 review here
Rise Of The Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax & The Creation Of D&D (£14-99, Nation Books) by David Kushner & Koren Shadmi…
“But that’s 
against the rules, Gary.”
“Then the rules need to be changed.”
Ah, the heady days of youth, heading down to the local Games Workshop to pick up a selection of psychedelically coloured, improbably shaped dice. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll probably remember the fevered excitement when books like the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual actually came out. If you weren’t too busy playing Manic Miner, that is…
Still, at the time, before the Marvel and DC encyclopaedias came along, that monster mash of a tome, plus the core AD&D rulebooks themselves, the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, made for the ultimate rainy-day read, and, if you and your mates could agree who would put the not-inconsiderable effort in to be the Dungeon Master, actually do some role-playing.
I was more of a Golden Heroes fan myself, an RPG that perhaps not unsurprisingly allowed you to be superheroes. Or indeed villains if the fancy took you. But, like many, I did also succumb to the lure of the twenty-sided icosahedron and spent some time dungeoneering. Mainly at school where I couldn’t play computer games, it has to be said, but still, I was well aware of the name Gary Gygax, and appreciated his efforts in endeavouring to stimulate my teenage imagination almost as much as Sir Clive Sinclair…
Gygax’s childhood and own formative years certainly make for a fascinating read. He loved listening to his father’s made-up fantasy stories and his mother reading the likes of Tom Sawyer to him. As a schoolboy he much preferred venturing into the labyrinth of tunnels underneath an old nearby sanatorium and exploring the abandoned insane asylum near a spooky lake than actually attending lessons, including a few narrow escapes dodging oddball locals who used to hang out there for presumably more nefarious reasons. Consequently, no one was entirely surprised when he dropped out of high school. A series of dead-end jobs followed, before a chance discovery of war gaming completely turned his life around.
There are some fascinating nuggets in this work which I was unaware of, such as the origin of modern war gaming is attributed to one Herbert George Wells. Good old H.G. actually published a non-fiction book entitled Little Wars, which described how he and his friend commandeered his son’s toy soldiers and created a game of their own, taking turns to tactically move their troops on imaginary battlefields. Wells then drew up a set of detailed rules so his readers could play such games for themselves. Shortly after he moved to Chicago aged 18, Gygax chanced upon a copy of Wells’ book, and thus his life’s obsession began.
It wasn’t, however, until over a decade of ever more elaborate war gaming, with an ever-increasing circle of friends and acquaintances, including postally, that the inspiration for D&D struck, courtesy of a particular medieval war game and a life-long love of the likes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books.
Trying out his new mash-up game, which he’d titled Chainmail, amongst his hardcore war gaming friends, the magical, fantastical elements were met with staunch resistance, even disgust. It wasn’t until Gygax met a young man called Dave Arneson another year later that things really took off.
Arneson then went away and added many of the true cornerstone concepts of D&D, such as the dungeons themselves, neatly constraining the environment for what is a virtually limitless, free-form improvisational game, plus the idea that the game never really ends, with players instead gaining experience, before undertaking the next challenge, and the next, and so on.
Gygax instantly saw the commercial potential of this variant version of Chainmail and immediately set about codifying his own large set of rules to cover as many eventualities as possible. Setting up a company called TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) to manufacture and distribute the game after little success touting it to the established game manufacturing companies, it promptly overran the imagination of the public and the subsequent sales went stratospheric. Arnseson, meanwhile, so instrumental in the creation of the game, was never asked to join the fledging company…
Gygax, frankly, during the rise and rise of TSR, comes across much like the master huckster himself, Stan Lee, with his obsession for minutiae, micro management of absolutely everything, plus a total inability to give Dave Arneson the credit, or cash, he so clearly deserved. Eventually, begrudgingly, when lawyers got involved, Gygax did the ‘decent’ thing, with Arneson getting the long overdue well earned credit as co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and a valuable 10% of royalties on sales.
Arneson, who like Gygax, features heavily as a talking head in this work, seemed pretty sanguine about it all, in retrospect at least. Though at the time, crafty moves like Gygax retitling Dungeons & Dragons as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, purely to claim Arneson was no longer entitled to his 10% royalty cheques, probably tested his temper, and sanity.
We then get the inevitable fall of the TSR empire, Gygax’s own tempestuous departure and his subsequent various endeavours, some more successful than others. Still, it’s an impressive legacy Gygax left, one which modern gaming, both online as well as offline, has heavily built on.
Still, despite enjoying it, I found this work a little bit perfunctory and dry in the narration, and I don’t think the grey-tone, art style helps in that respect, either. There’s pure Gygax gold I expected to be in there which sadly isn’t, such as his apparently successful personal wooing of no less a talent than Orson Welles to star in a planned D&D movie (can you imagine?!) which was shelved as the scale of the financial troubles at TSR became all too apparent.
Compared to Box Brown’s TETRIS, which is an utterly forensic, meticulously designed and brilliantly illustrated in-depth examination of that blockbuster classic plus the crazy characters and total chaos behind it, this feels, well, a touch by the numbers. Dare I say it, even lacking in imagination, which for a book based on the game that touted the very use of said quality and all about the man whom single-handedly (according to him heh heh) revolutionised gaming, is a bit disappointing.
JR
Buy Rise Of The Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax & The Creation Of D&D and read the Page 45 review here
Our Soppy Love Story (£9-99, Andrews McMeel Publishing) by Philippa Rice.
What a 
lot of delightful, light-hearted, thought-provoking fun!
For by OUR SOPPY LOVE STORY, Philippa Rice emphatically means yours.
This one is for you to write down, drawn in and co-create!
I will explain in a second.
Rice has already chronicled much of her own, ongoing love affair with HILDA’s Luke Pearson in SOPPY itself, a collection of dreamy yet often irreverent cartoons and comics so astutely observing their behaviour together. I wrote:
“Rarely have I been so immediately, directly and profoundly touched by a work of such intimate art. There is a purity here both in the content and the lines and shapes which depict this autobiographical insight.”
We were so transfixed that we invited Philippa Rice and Luke Pearson to sign SOPPY together at Page 45 on Valentine’s Day 2015 and this proved so endearingly cute that we had to start culling kittens behind the counter in order to level the Karmic Balance. I’m not making this up: every five minutes I would pull a cat from its bag and then wring its neck. It’s an odd sort of crunch, I can tell you.
Then, heralded by the likes of George Takei, the graphic memoire went global! An entire second-print run selling out worldwide within a mere ten days! A third print run immediately went to press and it sold and it sold, and continues to sell like crazy to this very day. Had it been anodyne and quite as soppy as the title suggested that would never have happened. Its mischief is a mirth-making joy.
This too is a joy, and there are indeed a few scattered comics and cartoons contained within, but it also a very different beast.
Instead, it is a cheekily inquisitive and surprisingly substantial, gently guided journal for you yourselves to fill in, as your one true romance begins to blossom and bloom.
I hope you don’t have to buy too many copies.
Not only will it prove a testament in time to your unique, highly personal, enduring love for each other – by noting your traditions, aspirations, and average day in your lives together – but, far more importantly, it will crystallise thoughts and feelings right now which you never necessarily knew you had and help you to articulate them. It will catalyse communication!
I’m no expert, but I would have thought that was one of the primary joys in sharing your lives with each other: communication. Sometimes, however, we do need a little nudge.
Rice knows exactly which questions to ask, and which prompts to offer for you in order to pursue this potentially illuminating, heart-felt investigation for yourselves, whether they be about yourself, your girlfriend or boyf, your husband or wife, or indeed your illicit other.
“Would you rather:
“Never read a book again OR never eat a dessert again?”
Leave out an ‘S’ and it’s easier: the last desert I ate gave me very dry wind and indigestion. I was also slightly suspicious of how many reptiles I might have wolfed down. Reptiles are important.
Anyway, I infinitely prefer books to banoffee pie, so that one’s very simple.
“Be able to talk to animals OR be able to read minds (human minds)?”
Before you make any snap decisions, may I suggest that being able to access the innermost thoughts of serial sexual harasser Donald Trump or any similarly suspected reprobate whom you come across down in London’s Tube might prove personally and profoundly uncomfortable or at least very awkward?
However many games of poker you might win with the “gift” of telepathy you would lose your sanity to in round one to a new deep-seated paranoia on discovering that ambivalence is nigh-ubiquitous. And that your two-faced neighbours actually hate you with a passion.
Jonathan can already talk to animals, but I rarely answer back.
“Be invisible OR be the only person who’s not invisible?”
Facial expressions are ever so important, don’t you think?
“Eat a spider OR kiss a pig?”
What’s wrong with pigs? Chauvinists aside.
So that’s about you, but you’re also asked about your significant other! You’re even invited to pose your own questions.
Do you really know what you truly think of each other? It’s time to find out in comparative checklists wherein you can debate between you which one is the more ticklish, tidy, calm, silly, sophisticated, organised, clumsy, grumpy, sleepy, happy, dopey.
You’re asked about the passing of time and your favourite weather. I’m only happy when it rains.
But you’re also prompted to live in the present as well, which is ever so Buddhist in appreciating what you have and expressing what you are experiencing in this moment that will never come again.
Finally, you’re encouraged to plan ahead with critical decisions like this for your future, which may well inform what happens next in your relationship should things go slightly skew-whiff:
“If I become a zombie, please…
“1) Kill me
“2) Leave me alone
“3) Allow me to bite you
“4) Keep me contained somewhere safe
“5) Other”
You are all cordially invited to bite me.
SLH
Buy Our Soppy Love Story and read the Page 45 review here
New Edition / Old Review:
Honor Girl s/c (£7-99, Candlewick) by Maggie Thrash.
What a price! 
Quick, before they change their minds!
“What was I doing before? Was I just… floating along? Maybe I was better off that way. Because what’s ironic is that being in love doesn’t actually make you happy. It makes it impossible to be happy. You’re carrying this desire now. Maybe if you knew where it came from, you could put it back. But you don’t.”
Maggie is only fifteen and she’s just fallen in love for the first time. With a woman. With a summer camp counsellor.
Maggie’s stomach is churning and she hasn’t the first clue what to do about any of it. She can’t get Erin or her feelings towards her out of her head and she’s stuck there for the summer. What if any of any of her friends find out? What if any of the counsellors find out? What if Erin finds out? What on earth is she supposed to do with all this?
Oh, the space and the light!
I knew this was graphic memoir was going to be a pleasure to read as soon as I opened it and the colours flooded out. But, being set in a remote, American summer camp for girls, I had no idea it would tick so many recognition boxes.
I’d praise Thrash’s memory – her ability to put herself back in her head aged fifteen – but my own memory’s appalling yet I remember every little bit of falling in love for the first time when my nascent self-awareness was too new to comprehend or cope. It’s not something you forget.
Still, there were a lot of surprises and this may not come with the conclusion you expect.
Thrash goes to great pains to emphasise right from the beginning how traditional this particular summer camp was. Unchanged since 1922, “There were mandatory Civil War re-enactments every morning. It was literally the blues screaming “blue” and the greys screaming “grey” for twenty minutes.” Grim. There’s also flag-raising and flag-lowering at morning and night, and singing lots of lovely Christian songs to each other.
Being a good little girl, Maggie had a pillow with all her merit patches sewn on; being a somnambulist, she also had a Somnambu-leash which she was supposed to attach to her ankle every evening. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to tell you she doesn’t – not every evening – and it’s worth bearing that in mind later on.
There were uniforms for uniformity (“I was used to environments where it was important for everyone to be the same”) and zero diversity bar one blonde Jewish girl so seemed to set each year’s fashion trends. Oh, and then there was the whole Honor Girl system.
“On the first night, we always serenaded the Honor Girl, a 16-year-old camper appointed the previous summer… Everyone would light a candle, and at the end of the song, we’d each touch our flame to hers. It was meant to be symbolic – the Honor Girl imbuing us with her perfect spirit.”
Are you getting a sense that this might be one of the least hospitable environments for anyone suddenly stumbling upon the notion that they might be gay? Add in a mass of insecure teenage peers and being trapped there with them morning, noon and indeed overnight… There were a couple of girls the previous year about whom rumours swirled and they were ostracised all season long.
As I say, I think this is going to surprise you, and it’s got 270 pages in which to do so.
I’ve seen this sort of stripped-down style done so badly, so blandly – most recently in a reasonably high profile Young Adult graphic novel I decided didn’t merit a review – but this is full of nuance and character and great body language. It’s amazing what you can do with a few simple lines as long as they’re placed just-so. The expressions often contradict what’s expressed like tells at a poker game. It falls under the umbrella of minimum fuss for maximum empathy, and the colours ensure it’s certainly no mope-fest.
There are great many giggles to boot. I loved the old camp commandant – sorry, director – popping out on the odd occasion to wave a canoe paddle furiously and bellow prohibitions before collapsing, pooped out on the deck.
The storytelling is crystal clear with plenty of variety – another of the problems I had with that YA graphic novel was it was as so repetitious, so deathly dull, like someone telling you a story with “And then he did this and then she did that and then he did this and we didn’t” – opening up at exactly the right moments with landscapes to let you linger and ponder like Maggie herself.
As the memoir kicks off and concludes she’s had two years to do precisely that.
SLH
Buy Honor Girl 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 information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.
The Realist: Plug And Play h/c (£18-99, Archaia) 
by Asaf Hanuka
Your Black Friend (£4-50, Silver Sprocket) by Ben Passmore
The Left Bank Gang (£11-99, Fantagraphics) by Jason
Why Are You Doing This? (£11-99, Fantagraphics) by Jason
The Selfish Dream (£5-00, Ichor) by Om Lekha & Blinky 4
The Practical Implications Of Immortality (£4-00, Throwaway Press) by Matthew Dooley
A Castle In England h/c (£14-99, Nobrow) by Jamie Rhodes & various including Isabel Greenberg
Everything Is Flammable h/c (£23-50, Uncivilised Books) by Gabrielle Bell
Garbage Night (£12-99, Nobrow) by Jen Lee
Hellblazer vol 16: The Wild Card s/c (£22-99, Vertigo) by Mike Carey & Marcelo Frusin, Steve Dillon, Lee Bermejo, Doug Alexander Gregory, Jock, Jimmy Palmiotti
How To Survive In The North (£12-99, Nobrow) by Luke Healy
Mayday s/c (£13-99, Image) by Alex De Campi & Tony Parker
Moonshine vol 1 s/c (£8-99, Image) by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
On To The Next Dream h/c (£11-99, City Lights) by Paul Madonna
Pantheon : The True Story of the Egyptian Deities (£12-99, Nobrow) by Hamish Steele
Rick And Morty: Lil’ Poopy Superstar (UK Edition) (£14-99, Titan) by Sarah Graley & Marc Ellerby
Batman: New Gotham vol 1 s/c (£26-99, DC) by Greg Rucka & Shawn Martinbrough, various
Moon Knight vol 2: Reincarnations s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Jeff Lemire & Greg Smallwood, Jordie Bellaire, Wilfredo Torres, Michael Garland, Francesco Francavilla, James Stokoe
Uncanny Inhumans vol 4: IVX s/c (£15-99, Marvel) by Charles Soule & R. B. Silva, Kim Jacinto, Ario Anindito
The Unworthy Thor s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Olivier Coipel, Kim Jacinto
Dragonball Super vol 1 (£6-99, Viz) by Akira Toriyama & Toyotarou
My Hero Academia vol 8 (£6-99, Viz) by Kohei Horikoshi
One Piece vol 82 (£6-99, Viz) by Eiichiro Oda
News!
ITEM! We are so lucky to have this so local!
Liam Sharp comic art exhibition at the Derby Museum Art Gallery, June 23rd to 3rd September 2017
This is the sort of thing you’d normally have to travel to London for – or even America!
I’m not guaranteeing that this piece will be there, but it gives you a clear indication of the level of intricacy which has been Sharp’s hallmark throughout his extensive career.
The former Derby resident will be flying back from San Francisco to be there in person, so if you want to shake his enormous, Viking hand in person, please keep track of my Twitter updates, turn up on the appropriate day and I will personally introduce you to one of the friendliest creators in comics who I have ever been lucky enough to call one of my mates.
We once stayed up all night and all morning, with no sleep at all, sharing our favourite tunes, some of which were written and recorded by Liam himself. Oh yes, the man is also a musician!
Speaking of…
ITEM! Black Dog: The Dreams Of Paul Nash songs & music CD is out now!
Just 10 quid direct from Dave so the man can make all the money himself without giving Mamazon a cut. Hurrah!
Reminder: BLACK DOG: THE DREAMS OF PAUL NASH graphic novel is such a powerful, eloquent, involving, almost overwhelming experience that we made it Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month, and it was one of my favourite graphic novel of the year.
We have the last 5 remaining copies worldwide of the original LICAF DUSTJACKETED EDITION OF BLACK DOG: THE DREAMS OF PAUL NASH signed and sketched on by Dave McKean, which was itself distributed exclusively by Page 45.
ITEM! I cannot begin to tell you how important this is, and how accurately observed the ramifications are if artists aren’t credited.
Sarah McIntyre continues her campaign to prove that Pictures Mean Business in:
‘7 Ways You Can Support Illustrators’ for BookTrust
Illustrations all by Sarah McIntyre: obvious to you perhaps, but not to everyone and therein lies the point. Some scumbags even erase other artists’ signatures to suggest the work is their own.
– Stephen
