Archive for October, 2017

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews October 2017 week four

Wednesday, October 25th, 2017

Featuring Dilraj Mann, Lizz Lunney, Darryl Cunningham, Tim Bird, Ben Read, Chris Wildgoose, Steve Skroce, Greg Rucka, Matthew Southworth, Warren Ellis, Jon Davis-Hunt, more!

Porcelain vol 3: Ivory Tower (Signed Bookplate Ed.) (£14-99, Improper Books) by Benjamin Read & Chris Wildgoose.

 

“Absolutely outrageous! You were definitely cheating! Because I was and you still won.”
“Never play cards with an ex-street thief, dear.”

It’s a beautiful, playful scene: Child who became Lady and who is now Mother, wrapped up all warm and sat on a tarpaulin-lined travelling rug, out in the snow among the shattered remains of the cemetery. Her two immediate children, Ariemma and Victorienne – one adopted, the other almost all that is left of the love of her life – have brought her a picnic of secret provisions and there is finally a brief lull or lacuna for laughter.

There’s also Nana, her former lover’s mother who provides nourishment and encouragement without fail.

“Steady on. Things aren’t that bad, are they?”
“I think… they are. It’s all falling down.”

Child came from nothing. Lady built so much. But Mother is another proposition altogether.

 

 

While resolute in her principal of defence not attack, Mother has surrounded her estate full of sentient Porcelain scientists, craftsmen and guardsmen with a vast, impenetrable wall and built therein – and high into the sky – the most enormous, elaborate tower structure which inevitably casts its imposing shadow over the surrounding city, forever drawing attention to its lofty self-seclusion.

She had no choice: the military wanted to use her Porcelain creations as weapons in their war and would not take “No” for an answer. “No” was her answer anyway, but it cost her dearly. Now she has seen everyone and everything she holds dear assaulted and under siege. She has done things in the interest of expediency which she prays that no one will know.

But it’s all coming out now, and it’s all coming down.

“Mother? Your order.”
“Launch the attack.”

 

 

I cannot even begin to tell you what a heart-wrenching tide you are in for. I could try, but your jaw will still hit the floor when turning the pages yourself.

PORCELAIN volume II was our biggest-selling graphic novel in 2015, even though it came out in October that year. Its sales eclipsed everything that was published as far back as January, February and March, and at Page 45 even doubled that of its worthy rival: Neil Gaiman’s return to SANDMAN with SANDMAN: OVERTURE.

Let’s play that again: Neil Gaiman, New York Times best-selling novelist returning to one of DC’s biggest perennial sellers, owned by Time Warner with its multi-million-dollar advertising budget. Its sales were, as expected, stratospheric. PORCELAIN is published from a small British farmhouse with an advertising budget of approximately zero.

 

 

Essentially steampunk, yet effortlessly levitating over any of those more quirky elements which might make it more niche, PORCELAIN is the story of one woman’s trajectory in life from a street-thief who had nothing but bullish friends to a woman who inherited – through assiduous attention and learning – a craftsman’s creative genius and then, in his memory, was inspired to set about building her own principled legacy whilst under pressure from society’s baser instincts and territorial demands. But that’s the funny thing about principles while under restriction and covert or overt attack: you inevitably compromise some, and there was always a dark secret at the heart of their art. Over and again, Mother maintains that if only she’d been left in peace in order to protect, then none of this would have been necessary…

PORCELAIN has also always been about family since volume one when the original Porcelain-maker adopted Child – who had none – as an “Uncle”. Now she too has adopted, and both her girls have become teenagers, eager to learn but restless and testing boundaries when the biggest boundary of all is that impenetrable wall, outside of which they aren’t safe. Nana is part of that family as are her trusted, wealthy advisors, Prosper and his lover Siegfried. But so are Mother’s Porcelain for they are not just sentient, they are each of them unique individuals with desires of their own and lives they might lose.

Ah yes, motherhood: it forms a much broader part of this arc than I’m willing to divulge, but here is a key moment when an option to evacuate is offered by the city, under safe passage aboard a fleet of trading vessels  en route to the Island States.

“Captain, you speak well, but I will not trust my children in another’s hands.”
“Great Alchymic, my reputation… my fleet would stand for you, as though my own children. Sail with us away from this coming war. Please.”
“… No. We leave in our own fleet one day or not at all. I’m sorry your time was wasted.”
“My lady, you must come with us. My future depends on it.”

There’s not one random word in the Captain’s entreaty and, when you read it, watch Chris Wildgoose’s body language carefully, then weep.

So we leave wordsmith Benjamin Read to focus on Chris Wildgoose, letter artist Jim Campbell who accentuates the Porcelains’ individuality through subtle variations within their speech balloons, and colour artist André May whose seasons, weather fluctuations and times of day are eloquently evoked even indoors. It’s a predominantly soft, subtle and complementary palette which May employs so that when the green glows, it does so eerily, ethereally and – in several eye-smacking scenes – as aggressively as if it were red.

As last time, Wildgoose provides nearly a dozen pages of detailed, annotated preparatory work showing just how much thought has gone into each Porcelain’s evolving body structure, red-glass armour, robes or uniforms, limb joints and the “almost ivy-like growth to the Rune patterns”.

I’ll have already slapped you with Chris Wildgoose’s monumental aerial shot of the tower structure which may have required a little more effort on Ben Read’s part than the similarly striking second page in their brilliant book, BRIAR. But I’d have to ask! It manages to combine, harmoniously, elements of the European and the traditional fairy-tale castle with Persian minarets and futurist buttressing, gangways and even gardens. Once more, hats off to André May in lighting each outcrop up against the city beneath it, distinct yet distanced by haze.

Mother’s face is more drawn than Lady’s, increasingly so as she wears herself out in The Link. The Link is where Mother can co-opt an individual Porcelain’s body momentarily or see through the eyes of all her creations at once – which gives one quite the advantage over any other generals when in command of an army.

The lines are crisp and ridiculously rich in detail, but never stiff, never without humanity especially when it comes to the Porcelain, some of which are slender and others ape-like in posture while Alder, the loyalist of the loyal, has a soft, tender gentleness in spite of his hulking body and massive, heavy hands.

As ever at Page 45 each copy of PORCELAIN comes – initially at least – with an exclusive bookplate signed by Ben Read and Chris Wildgoose for which we are profoundly and eternally grateful, just as we were proud to launch this third volume in our very own Georgian Room at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2017, much to the surprise of all including ourselves! I heartily love a last-minute surprise!

They never last long, so please snap them up. While stocks last, etc.

So here we go: once more the military will not take “No” for an answer and once more the adamant answer from Mother remains “No”.

The citadel is surrounded on all sides and – with the war over – the army has turned its full attention and all its resources upon Mother, her entourage and their sky-scraping enclave. Please do not think they are stupid. They have stratagems of their own.

Does our commanding ex-street thief having something fresh and unexpected up her sleeve?

She does! Yes, she does!

Oh. I’m very much afraid that she does.

SLH

Buy Porcelain vol 3: Ivory Tower (Signed Bookplate Edition) and read the Page 45 review here

Graphic Science: Seven Journeys Of Discovery (£16-99, Myriad) by Darryl Cunningham…

“In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images often accompanied by flashes of light which marred the sight of real objects.
“When a word was spoken to me, the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualise with the greatest faculty.
“I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. But I never had any control of the flashes of light to which I referred.
“In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of flame.
“Their intensity increased with time and seemingly attained a maximum when I was 25 years old.
“During this period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits. I had a violent aversion to the earrings of women but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystalline objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces.
“I would not touch the hair of other people, except at the point of a revolver.
“I would get fever by looking at a peach.
“I counted the steps of my walks.
“And calculated the cubical volume of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food.
“Otherwise my meal was unenjoyable.
“All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three, and, if I missed, I felt impelled to do them all over again, even if it took hours.”

Can you guess the mad scientist yet from that bonkers introduction?

No? I’ll give you one more clue…

“I was interested in electricity from the very beginning of my educational career.”

Yes, it’s Nicola Tesla!

 

 

Once again, Darryl Cunningham returns to educate and entertain us in equal measure with seven – count ‘em! (not you Tesla, you’ll be here all day!) – biographies of scientists who were just as fascinating in their everyday lives, if not more so, as they were for their discoveries. I would imagine that most people have probably at least heard of Tesla, but the other six will be far less well known to many, particularly if science is not your thing.

But that’s precisely why you should read this work, because not only does Darryl regale us with fun facts about his chosen luminaries, plus considerable detail about their particular privations and hardships that they endured, but he also clearly expounds the hypotheses and theories – some considerably more valid than others – for which his quorum of boffins became… okay, well, not well known to the general public, but certainly celebrated within their preferred fields of science. Though not all within their lifetimes unfortunately.

 

 

So in addition to Tesla we have Antoine Lavoisier who managed to debunk the then held theories about the composition of air and the illusory element Phlogiston before ultimately going to the guillotine during the French Revolution. Mary Anning, who did so much to further our understanding of geology and fossils but went almost completely uncredited purely due to her gender.

 

 

George Washington Carver, one of the last Americans to be born into slavery who fought against racial discrimination throughout his entire life whilst working on modernising agricultural techniques.

 

 

Alfred Wegener, who first put forward the concept of Pangea, though because it was before our understanding of how plate tectonics worked was frustratingly unable to provide a convincing mechanism to support his theory whilst alive.

 

 

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars and who was denied even a share of the Nobel Prize for her discovery due once again to gender discrimination.

 

 

And finally Fred Hoyle, who whilst he did some sterling work on explaining the abundance of all the various elements in the Universe, wasn’t averse to coming up with outlandish theories on pretty much anything and everything seemingly whenever the fancy took him, which contributed to costing him a Nobel Prize.

 

 

 

Moving forward from the mid 1700s to the modern day with this work, what Darryl so admirably demonstrates is that all of these very different individuals had a really deep compunction and relentless drive to experientially comprehend the world and universe around them, despite the relative paucity of information that was available to them. Their stories, of what they struggled with personally, as well as professionally, undoubtedly helped shape their formidable minds and thus to help advance our collective human understanding.

As we move ever further into the modern era of collaborative big science, with huge teams of people working globally on petabytes of data, often provided purely by computer modelling as much as experimental output, it’s perhaps becoming harder and harder to envisage individuals making such radical leaps in understanding, often against the conventional wisdom of the time, as our learned colleagues here all did.

For as we iterate ever closer to complete intellectual understanding of, well, everything in the Universe, with our rapidly burgeoning computer power, and indeed the advent of artificial intelligence driving virtual research many orders of magnitude faster than a human mind could even conceive of, you also get the sense that there are going to be fewer and fewer opportunities for such intuitive geniuses to help us spontaneously burst out of our currently held intellectual cul-de-sacs.

Fortunately, there will always be a need for comics, particularly ones by Darryl. It just occurs to me, actually, that there is a lovely dual meaning in the title for this work. For not only is Darryl detailing these scientists’ seven individual journeys of discovery, but he’s also very kindly providing us all with seven journeys of discovery of our own to engage upon.

Art-wise it’s the usual comically clinical, wittily engaging style which has served him so well to date with his previous works: PSYCHIATRIC TALES (we’ve more stock on its way!), SCIENCE TALES and SUPERCRASH. Though I am rather sad not to see Darryl’s own talking head this time around! He does however provide a very inspiring foreword, I must say. But I do always manage to spot something different each time, and here I found myself marvelling (no pun intended) at some Jack Kirby-esque moments whilst Darryl was illustrating some mysterious goings-on deep in outer space.

 

 

It also reminded me he did an amazing sequence of cosmically crazy character designs that he put up on social media a few months ago which I really, really hope end up getting used in something!

I will leave you with part of the concluding paragraph of his foreword, which, as I say, I found very rousing. From my perspective, he himself is doing exactly what this call to action exhorts us all to do…

“Be a scientist in your own life. Change things the way these seven people did. They were not superhuman. They struggled much as we do. Yet they have transcended their lives and given much to the world.”

JR

Buy Graphic Science: Seven Journeys Of Discovery and read the Page 45 review here

Dalston Monsterzz h/c (£14-99, Nobrow) by Dilraj Mann.

“Last time I saw you I predicted you’d meet a new boy… Is this he?”
“No no no. This is another guy.”
“You have two?”
“He’s not another guy. He’s the other one’s friend.”
“You’re seeing two friends? Risky.”

It’s the way that reputed fortune teller Afsa Al Ansari holds up her palm advisedly – along with her doubtful gaze – that makes it so funny.

Lolly and Roshan did not get off to the best start. Lolly started dating Roshan’s best friend Kay and Roshan swiftly grew meanly, inarticulately jealous: she was coming between their bromance.

Thing is, poor Roshan had only just got out of Holloway’s Young Offender Institution after a criminal six-month sentence for idly stealing a £1-50 bottle of water and (one bike ride aside) suave and confident Kay has been far from attentive. He’s been partying away while Roshan’s languished alone in his nagging home in one of the old Brutalist block of concrete flats.

Parenthetically, Rosh was stitched up by an opportunist politician called David Dawes. And if that sounds slightly familiar then, yes, real-life Nicolas Robinson received a six-month sentence for stealing a £3-50 case of water from Lidl in Brixton in August 2011 following the London riots and subsequent looting. It was a £3-50 case of water! That’s something that I’m unlikely to ever forget.

 

 

So be not deceived: within this fashion riot and monster romp there is a great deal of scathing socio-political satire about the gentrification of East London and the corruption that’s come with it – right at the top.

Property developer Conrad Vess is at its epicentre. Oh, he has many a dark secret, does Conrad Vess, not least his family circumstances. He also has connections, from the police head-honcho to his close Confidence, leader of the Teenage Mutant Dalston Bastards. There are many such gangs in East London and you’ll find a handy map and breakdown of these territorial tossers on pages 34 and 35, plus they all have their own monsters outside of Conrad Vess. Monsters…? Giant Monsters! We will get to them in a second, but each gang has its own schtick: its base location, modus operandi and unifying sartorial brand – they are beautifully designed. I particularly liked the t-shirt triangles and their inverted red facial tattoos or face-paint.

 

 

Dilraj has a fine eye for chic urban fashion, be it observed or imagined. It won him a place in the British Comics Awards a few years ago, deservedly so. His body forms are deliciously atypical while his faces can be so grotesque as to make monsters out of everyone. In some ways he reminds me of Dave Cooper. Anyway, it’s all so apposite here.

So: there are monsters – ever so colourful, some of them. They are reckoned to have begun manifesting during the massive property development upheaval when ugly flats were torn down to make way for luxury accommodation for the stinking rich. Not for the many, but for the few. They crawled out of the gaping holes in the housing market and have since started parading around Dalston on stilts (by which I mean their own legs) or bouncing about Lolly’s symbiotic best friend Neana. When her monster rests Lolly grows super-strong, able to punch up a posse or strike down a dude on one go. They can communicate, although wait until you work out how Neana is summoned. Clue: it requires a quick trip into the bushes.

Lolly, I should tell you, is Vess’s step-daughter and she has gone officially missing. This has pissed off Conrad Vess for reasons beyond parental pride or protection for in fact our Lolly was kicked out of home. So he has called on gang leader Confidence to root her out of hiding, but Confidence kidnapped her boyfriend Kay instead in order to lure Lolly to Conrad’s Zag complex from which he operates a brutal underground tournament entertainment for international investors to gather round then bet on.

Did I mention that there might be a smidgeon of socio-politics?

“Let’s get out of her, Neana.
“It’s time for some exposition.”

 

Lolly is probably right: you’re feeling a little lost. We are in desperate need some sort of summary so let’s hear it from Roshan who is riding high on monster Neana with Lolly whom he used to loathe.

“So let me get this straight.
“Your old gang kidnapped Kay.
“We need to get to this Zag place but you don’t know where it is.
“And all the gangs in Dalston are after you?
“Oh, and I need to ask… What is a Bad Bitch and how do I become one?”

You’ll need to level-up, Roshan!

 

 

This is delirious and I am in love, with everything from its design to its sequential-art narrative. There is a flight and fight scene spanning two pages which thrilled me. I’ve not seen anything quite like it. That double-page spread boasts multiple, split but grouped panels within what would normally be a single panel to reflect – I think – the ever-increasing, frantic and bellicose beat of the pursuers and pursued ones’ hearts. Towards its climax the colours do the opposite of flat-line yet flatten to a potentially explosive vital, vivid and cardiac red.

Whooosh! when you turn over the page, however! It’s like an intense compression giving birth to brand-new day and a life-saving opportunity to live yet another!

Everything here is so masterfully connected. It’s only when you ascend this rollercoaster’s climax that you will comprehend exactly how each element mirrors, is distorted by, or was always going to engender the other.

Oh. Now, do you remember where we came in with Lolly asking Afsa Al Ansari for directions only to receive dubious dating advice? It turns out that Afsa’s daughter Aisha has some precognitive skills of her own, advising our Roshan to Google “Falada” or else be consumed during his rescue mission by monsters. You might want to Google that too.

Lastly:

“For your information, it wasn’t parsley…
“It was coriander.”

Haha! You’ll see!

SLH

Buy Dalston Monsterzz h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Street Dawgz: Boxlife (£5-00, self-published) by Lizz Lunney.

“Still I’ll find new accommodation…
“We’ll make plans… from mobile phones.”

 – David Sylvian / Japan

Wait, wait – mobile homes!

It’s mobile homes, Stephen!

But either applies here. You’ll see.

It’s the return of anthropological expert Professor Lizz Lunney for a searing socio-political indictment of poverty, class, and homelessness in the form of the demi-delusional STREET DAWGZ whose last beatnik appearance I treated with equally rigorous academic acumen.

Dingo, Jekyll, Rossetti and Ian (that still makes me laugh) are all living the dream from the confines of their shared cardboard box, and they have everything they need for a fulfilling life of high-brow art-assessment and low-brow, bow-bow begging.

“Apart from food.”
“And water.”
“And intelligent company.”

 

 

Who needs an architect to draw up a costly, intricate extension to bricks and mortar when you are quite literally living in a box? Not these four fools. They can just scavenge for a second, open-plan cardboard cottage and bunk up in pairs. But they will need to put more thought than that into curing dipstick Dingo of his newfound hound-held addiction to social media.

Oh yes, even the homeless pine for a fulfilling life online – and why wouldn’t they when their real one is so deprived? Dingo has acquired a smart phone (I know not from where) and has become utterly absorbed in his daily desire for constant affirmation through BookFace, Bitter and Winstagram:

“If I get a million ‘likes’ for one of my images I win.”
“Win at what?”
“At life, I hope.”

I think that’s unlikely, Dingo, but do please see HELLBOUND LIFESTYLE for similar struggles and potential recognition-box-ticking. Then enjoy Dingo’s wider algorithm blues.

It’s all too, too funny! And true!

I think you’ll enjoy the Lord Of The Rings “Precious” reference.

 

 

If picking this up from our counter or ordering online, please help yourselves to free money. It claims that it’s “worthless” but it’ll set you up right proper in Lizzneyland.

I’d like to live in Lizzneyland. I doubt you can drive there. It’s more of a state of mind, medically referred to as dementia.

SLH

Buy Street Dawgz: Boxlife and read the Page 45 review here

The Rocket (£4-00) by Tim Bird…

 

“I think he’s overdone that slightly.”

On the face of it, a comic about snooker doesn’t seem like the most fascinating topic. Yet for fans of stroking their balls across the green baize, or just larger than life sporting characters such as one Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan, this will be just like the moment they first heard Captain Sensible sing the Snooker Song. But better. Much better. Though with that said, here’s John Hurt reciting from the Hunting Of The Snark mashed up with the not-so-Sensible one doing the Snooker Song all accompanied by a full orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. It certainly makes you miss John Hurt…

Anyway, back in 1997 the youthful O’Sullivan achieved an outlandish feat, which to me and many other amateur cue-men, seemed verging on the impossible: hitting a maximum 147 break in a mere 5 minutes 20 seconds. 36 shots of potting perfection at an average of a mere 8.8 seconds per shot.

 

 

Casting my mind further back to watching the moustachioed Cliff Thornburn’s epic 147 at the Sheffield Crucible in 1983, which seemed to take an eon – I can still clearly see the look of fearsome ‘tasche-twitching tension on his face as he took on a long-distance pressure pot on the final yellow – the idea that someone could clear the table whilst making it look like they were simultaneously going for a walk in the park seems utterly preposterous. It still does, frankly.

 

 

Here, Tim Bird provides us with his unique take on this slice of snooker history. I’ve often commented that Tim’s exquisite combination of words and images has a majesty akin to poetry. Here he manages to achieve that feeling with only the barest amount of text, this being mostly silent, aside from the referee racking up the Rocket’s scorching scoring and the odd nod to Ted Lowe’s apposite sublimely understated commentary.

“Four minutes for the century.
“Amazing.”

 

 

Instead Tim conjures up various camera angles and close-ups, makes full use of the classic trajectory-line-on-table BBC special effect, plus throws in one very neat time lapse trick on a full-page spread where we get multiple Rockets (nine!) at the same time, slamming balls in from every conceivable direction that even the master trickster John Virgo would simply have to stop and marvel at.

 

 

It’s a visual feast of intricate page and panel composition throughout that neatly captures the insanely brilliant lunacy of five minutes and twenty seconds of non-stop action from a man in a dinner suit nailing snooker shots with a precision of an expert sniper caressing a chattering, smoking AK47. Or was that just chalk dust? Not even Bond could do it better.

 

 

I genuinely think Tim Bird is as amazing as Whispering Ted Lowe thought Ronnie O’Sullivan was. A neatly framed piece of comics perfection.

JR

Buy The Rocket and read the Page 45 review here

Maestros #1 (£3-25, Image) by Steve Skroce.

Irreverent High Fantasy melded with funny Low Filth, this unsurprisingly appealed enormously to Brian K. Vaughan who gleefully ran a preview in the latest issue of SAGA, although emphatically not the pages which require us to bag every copy so that no eyes younger than sixteen years old stray unexpectedly across the transformational excess of a Personal Legend elixir.

There’s at least one moment like that in every collection of SAGA, reminding you – however lovely Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples are – why you thought better of lending the series to your mother, your grand-mother or your youngest nephew or godson.

With detailed blood, guts, gore that will score highly with any Geoff Darrow fan (see SHAOLIN COWBOY), we open with a splendid, skull-crushing, infernal massacre as the wizard Mardok and his minions stage a surprise assault on the reigning Maestro, eviscerating him, his oh so many wives, and the entire royal family to boot. At least, those still residing within the Realms.

 

 

One of his wives, Margaret, divorced the now former Maestro on the grounds of gross depravity and was consigned to a comfy cage for her troubles, but at least she secured the exile of her son. This saved both their souls, but now they are the only members of the royal line left alive so Margaret is dispatched by a walking, talking, bipedal sunflower to rescue fully-grown Willy from his own low-grade, magical, ill-gotten gains before Mardok and his minions (do not forget them!) catch up with him in a strip joint.

 

 

Before you can holler “Too late!” we are treated to an extreme late-night viewing of The Little Shop Of Horrors and a page which I do wish I had for you involving the interior view of a floral gullet which would make a man-eating shark look all gummy and toothless.

Later, we learn about the origins of our planet, as a smaller Willy first discovers that Earth’s creator was in fact his great grand-father…

“We watched your people crawl out of the mud without the help of any magic or gods except what your imagination created. Your will and ingenuity amazed me.”

… And we are presented with a glorious panel of our gradual and deeply impressive evolution, rising up from hunched-over ape to homo erectus thence homo sapiens, to comic-carrying, fizzy-pop-guzzling, puppy-fatted, mid-teen Willy.

 

 

Please ask at the counter if you’d like to see what’s inside, or indeed my resignation.

SLH

Buy Maestros #1 and read the Page 45 review here

Stumptown vol 1 s/c (£8-99, Oni) by Greg Rucka & Matthew Southworth.

From the writer of LAZARUS, BLACK MAGICK and half of GOTHAM CENTRAL etc, if you like Lark’s art you will love Southworth’s. I’d been looking forward to this for months now when the hardcover came out five years ago, and it did not disappoint!

It’s something more for CRIMINAL and indeed SCALPED readers to get their teeth stuck into; even the art bears a resemblance to Sean Phillips’s, only with a little more light and a few ruled lines.

It’s not noir, but it is fine contemporary crime set around Portland starring a P.I. called Dex who’s smart on a case but dumb in a casino. The truth is she just can’t quit. It’s a trait that’s going to land her in so much trouble tonight when she agrees to look for Charlotte, the granddaughter of the all-seeing owner of the casino who is prepared to write off Dex’s 18K in return for her services. Charlotte’s taken her clothes and toiletries but not her car. And she is still alive but Dex’s investigations are hampered by two additional but very different parties also after Charlotte.

As with GOTHAM CENTRAL, Rucka’s created a cast with more than a little heart – everyone asks after Dex’s younger brother Ansel, no matter which side they’re on.

 

 

The dialogue is a free-flowing, naturalistic joy, clues are dotted all over the place if you care to scan the panels properly and – oh look! – we even have interior art to show off! That is one majestically sweeping piece of inset-panel placement.

SLH

Buy Stumptown vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Hookjaw – Classic Collection h/c (£29-99, Titan) by Pat Mills, Ken Armstrong & Ramon Sola, Juan Arrancio, Eric Bradbury, Feliz Carrion, Jim Bleach.

The one that got away!

The Great White Shark returns from the depths of censorship to swim another day and bite another boy in two.

Another classic British strip from the pages of ACTION weekly, which fell foul of ill-informed media outrage rather than anything else, as is always the way. The public was lapping it up.

Ramon Sola drew a voracious, dead-eyed predator which did actually look like a Great White coming at you from all angles, churning the Caribbean seas up with enough lithe ferocity to give you the willies. Alas, once Felix Carrion took over there was barely more than a single head-shot repeated ad nauseam, with rows of cartoon spikes rather than teeth.

Now, unlike Hookjaw himself, I haven’t had time to digest everything in sight, but to an adult’s eyes the writing seems as lame as the lettering: bland capitals not in speech balloons, but in stencilled boxes whose individual lines bulged awkwardly as dialogue required. Each week Armstrong sought another excuse to send his oil rig workers back down underwater to scream “The jaws! The jaws!” as the ecologically driven Hookjaw (he had a hook through his lower jaw, courtesy of episode one) made it his personal mission to sabotage any form of self-sufficiency in the Caribbean oil industry. No wonder Shell handed back their license to Trinidad in 2003.

Another oddity which someone might explain to me is how come a commercial aircraft crashes conveniently beside the oil rig as Hurricane Clara hits in 1970 six pages after the series has been explicitly anchored in 1973.

Okay, I’m expecting too much: it’s just a production line to sate kids’ interest on a weekly basis following the success of the film Jaws. If I’d read it myself back then I’d have been as hooked as the giant haddock here, having spent a childhood with at least one nightmare a week involving sharks to the point where (thanks perhaps to James Bond) I could even make them out circling around the shallow end of an indoor public swimming pool.

 

 

2009 saw a half-hearted attempt to collect the carnage with atrocious reproduction values and the sort of contents page that puts one in mind of a nineteen-year-old-student’s first dissertation before computers were invented. Fortunately this is far more lavish, complete with its original coloured pages and, in any case, is not to be confused with last year’s HOOKJAW by Simon Spurrier & Conor Boyle which our chum Jonathan (who bought the original series as it came out!) reviewed with relish.

SLH

Buy Hookjaw – Classic Collection h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Wild Storm vol 1 s/c (£14-99, DC) by Warren Ellis & Jon Davis-Hunt.

“Take it from me: there’s no such thing as being alive too long.
“There’s always something new.”

There speaks the futurist in Warren Ellis, constantly scanning the technological, literary and political horizons for what’s coming next.

This time, however, the creator of INJECTION, TRANSMETROPOLITAN, TREES et al is concerned with new iterations, specifically of old Wildstorm characters like those he himself introduced in THE AUTHORITY and its predecessor, STORMWATCH. It was a broader science fiction than its subgenre of superheroes, whilst keeping some of its more prominent trappings – the costumes, HQ and action – right out in front in order to please its readers. It did please its readers including me. I recommend THE AUTHORITY unequivocally.

This veers even further away into purer science fiction with a far more European sensibility aided by Jon Davis-Hunt’s clean detail and spirit of place, and Ivan Plascencia’s cool blue and brown, sky and earth palette slashed with mere traces, tiny trickles of blood which make them all the more painful and worrying.

 

 

You need have read nothing before: Ellis is starting from scratch as if nothing had gone before, although there’s no point in throwing the babies with some potential out along with the cold, dirty bathwater. Deliberately, then, I’ll mention no more of the imprint’s prior incarnation and simply suggest some of what is presented here.

 

 

Covert civic operations seeking to keep gene-spliced blood out of the city’s water supply. Overt economic operations seeking to make big bucks from cleaner energy sources while keeping the alien nature of their corporation’s head under wraps. Covert International Operations seeking to keep quietly running the world while wizened Henry Bendix aboard Skywatch keeps tabs on them suspiciously from above. Miles Craven, director of I.O., seeking to share a street-side citron pressé with his husband Julian without being harassed by a clumsy, scatty and intense scientist / employee called Angela Spica determined to raise the bar on their ambitions exponentially in order to enhance lives worldwide in a whole new way.

Each one of those goals is compromised, in one way or another, by the chain reaction within.

 

 

For a start, Angela’s already experimented on herself.

I’m going to leave it there for fear of spoilers, but I’ll just return, if I may, to Jon Davis-Hunt and that “tiny trickle of blood”. There’s a slash in Angie’s t-shirt suggesting the experiment hurt plenty, but that’s nothing compared to a small sequence of panels after Angie sees a man bursting out of a plate glass window high above the HALO billboards advertising “Solar For Homes”, “A Battery Cell For Life” and “We’re Making The Next New World”. It is excruciating, as jagged shards of cellular meta-metal rearrange themselves and multiply, tearing through tissue then skin. The skin is just under one of Angie’s eyes. Every element there has been designed to emphasise the personal price and pain.

 

 

So:

HALO wants to make the world cleaner.

Angie wants to make the world safer.

International Operations wants to keep the world broken: it’s easier to control that way.

I was going to expand my re-edited review of the first issue to the whole collection but then I read this on the back cover and vomited: “These legendary antiheroes transformed the way superhero stories were told. Their return will rip the system once again”.

Typical hype-monkey lies, through and through.

 

 

Corporate hype-monkeys: you are transparent. How do you even live with yourselves? You’d fit in so well at UKIP and the Tory party.

I bet they sell insurance on the side.

SLH

Buy The Wild Storm vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Batman / The Flash: The Button Deluxe Edition h/c (£17-99, DC) by Joshua Williamson, Tom King & Jason Fabok, Howard Porter…

“Flash. The bloody button we found in the cave after Wally appeared. I was looking over it again, and it had some sort of reaction to Psycho-Pirate’s mask.”
“Oh, Bruce, hey! So yeah, I’m kind of in the middle of a kind of Samuroid invasion thing. Sorry, can this wait?”
“The radiation we found on the button seems to have spiked. Appeared as if it ripped a hole in the Speed Force. I saw… there was… something wrong at the bottom of the hole.”
“Okay… well, there’s, like, still thirty-seven of these things coming. Should take me… I don’t know…. How about I meet you at the cave in one minute?”
“All right.”
KKRACKK
“You said a minute. Of all people, Flash, didn’t expect you to be early.”
“Flash? No. Quite the reverse, actually.”

Ostensibly this is part two of the ongoing epic that sees the regular DC Multiverse and the Watchmen Universe collide (see DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH for a review of part one to get you up to speed as to why the entire New 52 epoch was a… fabrication)  which will conclude imminently with the forthcoming DOOMSDAY CLOCK penned by Geoff Johns, as was DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH.

 

 

Now… even though Geoff Johns isn’t credited with any writing duties on this particular 4-parter that ran through the regular BATMAN and FLASH titles, I can detect his sticky little paws all over it. Not least because, to my mind, it subtly references (in addition once again to FLASHPOINT) two other previous books by Johns in the form of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA: THE LIGHTNING SAGA and FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF 3 WORLDS. Make of that what you will… Yes, many loose ends are simultaneously becoming unravelled and others getting tied up as it all becomes a bit timey-wimey in this bridging volume. Maybe we’ll finally find out where that pesky lightning rod came from!

 

 

Once again, this is a very well written piece of fun, with not one, but two, real ocular moisture-inducing moments for the more histrionic of DC fans, as Bruce and Barry set off for a jog on the cosmic treadmill to discover precisely why the Reverse Flash is lying dead in a crispy friend fashion on the Batcave floor. I wonder, can we think of anyone previously accused of irradiating people…? Let me give you a clue… he’s blue and he has a self-inflicted brand on his forehead.

 

 

Just in case you’re really not sure by now, the postscript featuring Dr. Manhattan (well, his arm at least) will only tantalise you further as said clock ticks inexorably towards midnight…

I would probably pre-order DOOMSDAY CLOCK right now in order to avoid becoming the splattered victim of your own Rorschach Test.

 

JR

Buy Batman / The Flash: The Button Deluxe Edition h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Avengers: Standoff s/c (£31-99, Marvel) by Nick Spencer, various & Mark Bagley, various.

I had zero intention of reviewing its prologue and little more inclination to read it. But do you know what? It surprised me. What became of the story as a whole I will never know but, for what it’s worth, I wrote this of the first forty pages:

I love Nick Spencer’s THE FIX and THIEF OF THIEVES plus his work at Marvel has been better than most. But the last thing anyone wanted or needed so early into Marvel’s fresh, post-SECRET WARS re-launch was a crossover to which this is the kick-off catalyst.

It will envelope nearly a dozen different Marvel titles – ranging from its multiple AVENGERS series to the non-entity why-do-these-even-exist – written and drawn by completely different individuals, so the quality here is no indication of what is to come. To be clear: this is not an endorsement of the pocket-gouging policy nor an encouragement for you to splash out ridiculous sums of cash  on a corporate crossover when superhero fans could instead be buying the enormously entertaining JESSICA JONES, INFAMOUS IRON MAN or even THE WICKED + THE DIVINE, all of which essentially feature powers without capes.

But this is, nonetheless, an interesting premise whose initial execution sets the stage for a great deal of dramatic irony.

Pleasant Hill is a leafy little town where everyone is idyllically happy and civic-minded. There are restrictions, to be sure: curfews etc, but everyone is exceedingly kind and almost excessively courteous, especially to strangers. Stray upon it by accident and you may not want to leave – which would be fortunate, since you can’t.

 

 

You can’t because it’s a construct, a sham. It’s a prison for supervillains created by S.H.I.E.L.D. which has grown bored shitless of incarcerating super-powered sociopaths only for them to break out and cause billions of dollars of collateral damage (and, incidentally, the loss of lives) to satisfy their psychopathy. If psychopathy is ever satisfied: I don’t think those two words mix, really, do they?

The whole enterprise is understandably way off the books because it involves a complete abandonment of human rights. S.H.I.E.L.D. is using fragments of the reality-altering Cosmic Cube to rewrite the felons’ entire identities. They’re not just brainwashing them, they are refashioning them into new individuals physically and mentally.

Now, let us be clear: I’m all for it. I don’t believe in the real-life death penalty because I don’t have faith in the British or American or almost every other justice system because they have been proved over and over again to be racist and target-driven rather than justice-driven: innocent individuals are locked up every day by those who know they’re not guilty. In the la-la land of superheroes wherein the villains run riot, however, I’m with Maria ‘Pleasant’ Hill of S.H.I.E.L.D. – fuck ‘em.

 

 

The problem lies in my previous paragraph, because S.H.I.E.L.D. has just done precisely that: they have incarcerated a hero who got too close to their truth. What I will not spoil for you who has become trapped there and who they’re been turned into on the very last page. Clever.

I don’t know if it’s Scott Hanna’s inks or a departure for ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN’s Mark Bagley, but the art here is slightly more grounded in reality, ironically enough.

SLH

Buy Avengers: Standoff s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

New reviews to follow, but if they’re new formats of previous books, reviews may already be up; others will retain their Diamond previews information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.

Monograph h/c (£45-00, Rizzoli International Publications) by Chris Ware

The Comic Book Story Of Video Games (£16-99, Ten Speed Press) by Jonathan Hennessey & Jack McGowan

Futchi Perf (£14-50, Uncivilised Books) by Kevin Czap

Now #1 (£8-99, Fantagraphics) by Rebecca Morgan, Sara Corbett, Tobias Schalken, Eleanor Davis, Dash Shaw, Gabrielle Bell, J.C. Menu, Noah Van Sciver, Tommi Parrish, Kaela Graham, Daria Tessler, Conxita Hererro, Malachi Ward, Matt Shean, Antoine Cosse, Sammy Harkham, Nick Thorburn

Present (£14-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by Leslie Stein

Redneck vol 1: Deep In The Heart s/c (£14-99, Image) by Donny Cates & Lisandro Estherren

The Secret Loves Of Geek Girls (£12-50, Dark Horse) by various including Mariko Tamaki, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Marjorie Liu, Margaret Atwood, Jen Vaughn

Shaolin Cowboy: Who’ll Stop The Reign h/c (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Geof Darrow

Super Tokyoland (£22-99, Top Shelf) by Benjamin Reiss

Underwinter vol 1: Symphony s/c (£8-99, Image) by Ray Fawkes

Batman: Night Of The Monster Men s/c (£14-99, DC) by James Tynion IV, various & Riley Rossmo, Roge Antonio, Andy MacDonald

Hellblazer vol 2: The Smokeless Fire s/c (£14-99, DC) by Simon Oliver & Philip Tan

Super Sons vol 1: When I Grow Up… s/c (£11-99, DC) by Peter J. Tomasi & Jorge Jimenez, Alisson Borges

Wildstorm: A Celebration Of 25 Years h/c (£26-99, DC) by Warren Ellis, Brett Booth, Brandon Choi, J. Scott Campbell, Dan Abnett, Christos Gage & Bryan Hitch, Brett Booth, Jim Lee, Neil Googe, Dustin Nguyen

Weapons Of Mutant Destruction s/c (£15-99, Marvel) by Greg Pak & Mahmud A. Asrar, Robert Gill, Marc Borstel

Inuyashiki vol 9 (£10-99, Viz) by Hiroya Oku

Tokyo Ghoul re: vol 1 (£8-99, Viz) by Sui Ishida

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews October 2017 week three: Lakes Festival Special

Thursday, October 19th, 2017

The following comics, Moomin tote bag and prints are now available for Worldwide Distribution EXCLUSIVELY from Page 45! Festival photos below!

Also: thank you, thank you, thank you! Page 45 broke its own weekend sales record yet again! £10,195.27 is what we took on top of Nottingham sales, and exactly £1,300.00 of that goes directly to OCDAction and LICAF itself, including its Creator Development Fund, through weekend sales of the following…

Spirit Centenary Newspaper (Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2017) (£5-00, LICAF) by Sean Phillips (editor), Ed Brubaker, Brendan McCarthy, Graham Dury, Chris Samnee, John M Burns, Sergio Aragones, Peter Milligan, Seth, Jason Latour, Jonathan Ross & Sean Phillips, Becky Cloonan, Brendan McCarthy, Simon Thorp, Chris Samnee, John M Burns, Sergio Aragonés, Duncan Fegredo, Seth, Jason Latour, Bryan Hitch, Michael Cho.

“Oh. Thank Goodness. It was a dream.”
“Umm… Not this time, Mister Spirit.”

Haha, dear, dear Chris Samnee!

It can be a rough-and-tumble world, fighting crime.

Under a sensual, bold and beautiful Becky Cloonan cover, this 12-page anthology of 10 self-contained stories is a breath-taking, broadsheet-sized spectacle at a whopping 23” x 14.5” or 58 x 27 cm.

With love, respect and a great deal of grin-inducing wit, a stunning array of top-tier international comicbook creators celebrate the centenary of the birth of Will Eisner (1917-2017) in a project instigated by John McShane and LICAF itself, then directed and edited by Festival Patron Sean Phillips, artist on KILL OR BE KILLED, CRIMINAL, USER, THE FADE OUT, FATALE and so much more.

I don’t know if it’s wholly inappropriate to note that Sean also paid for its printing from his own pocket, but I am my own editor, and so I do so.

Sean provides a full page here along with his co-conspirator on the above, Ed Brubaker. It is as subtle as you’d imagine. It is so subtle that you will need to read it with your eyes peeled at least twice to spy what The Spirits spots on Marvin to make him such an obvious suspect in the killing of sadistic (so not much missed) crime lord Mugsy Cleaver.

The Spirit takes his time and does our Zippo-dead Marvin a favour. After all, Marvin has done us all one of those.

Honour, justice, care and compassion: that was Will Eisner through and through.

Ever since our beardly beloved Mark first introduced me to Eisner in the form TO THE HEART OF THE STORM, I have relished the humanity, wisdom, dexterity and integrity of this humble, sequential-art giant who remains the comicbook king of gesticulation. I don’t have many true heroes in life: Rosa Parks, MARCH’s Congressman John Lewis and Will Eisner – I think that’s about it – so I would please urge you at your leisure to pop Will Eisner into our search engine to explore the breadth of his non-genre fiction. I do believe that I have reviewed every single one of his graphic novels, some at great length… except for THE SPIRIT.

I confess that THE SPIRIT is a mystery to me apart from its iconic incorporation of titles into the very environment of its opening splash pages.

From the LICAF Eisner exhibition. More photos below!

Those I have relished for hours. But if, like me, you are new to the character and are buying this to see all the love lavished upon him by some of your favourite contemporary creators, then we are in the same boat! It is completely accessible, I assure you.

Part of the art of the single-page story, it strikes me, is a good, old-fashioned, unexpected twist, either within the tale itself or – in a homage – on whatever it is a tribute to.

ENIGMA’s Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo provide both!

It took me a full three panels to realise that we’ve fast-forwarded to the 21st Century because I am a complete and utter moron. It’s there, right in the opening shot of a subway-train passenger who is accessing – via his mobile phone – one of those ghost-hunting TV-host twerps, grandstanding away in a graveyard.

“For over fifty years people have seen a figure moving among these chill gravestones…
“The figure is usually wearing a crumpled blue suite. Sometimes he sports and ridiculous mask… or a hokey old hat…”

Nice! Unlike that preposterous, self-serving charlatan, attention-seeking is the last thing on The Spirit’s agenda.

“Since Wildwood gained a reputation for being haunted, sartorial insults are the least of my problems…”

He needs anonymity, plus peace and quiet to slip in and out of his home swiftly, unnoticed, or he could miss his opportunity to apprehend. Instead he’s had to skulk in the shadows and dart circuitously from one ivy-strewn gravestone to another to keep undercover. Still, if there’s one thing that The Spirit is adroit at, it’s using whatever’s to hand in order to solve his problems – even if whatever’s to hand is the problem itself. Oh, so many twists are in store!

Jonathan Ross (yes, that Jonathan Ross) and Bryan Hitch give it their all. Truly there is no stinting. Ross takes on Miss Verushka Diamandas – the very essence of sybaritic, oh so supposed insouciance – and peels her back to her bleached, back-street, wrecking-yard roots. But she simply refuses to submit.

If you relish the scale and neo-classical figure work as much as I do of Bryan Hitch (THE AUTHORITY plus THE ULTIMATES SEASON ONE and THE ULTIMATES SEASON TWO, my favourite socio-political superhero comics of all time – yes, including that one!), then you are in for a treat.

“I’m Verushka Diamandas. And I want my jewels.”

I’m not so sure that The Spirit is. I think he’s in for more of a gulp.

ROGAN GOSH’s Brendan McCarthy brings a softer brand of his customary psychedelic swirls of colours to bear on a tremendously moving and affirmative clarion call from the afterlife into action, and you might notice an addition to his blue suit. Loved it!

Seth is more solemn and as quiet as a mouse. He focuses on the buildings and topography of Central City, as you might expect from the creator of GEORGE SPROTT etc. The last two panels say it all. Very sad, that.

By contrast, you just know that Sergio Aragonés is going to make you howl, but he leaves it until the very last minute for maximum impact and the chap checking his watch is a triumph. Irreverent? Of course it is! This is the co-creator of GROO – and there’s a clue!

VIZ’s Graham Dury and Simon Thorp start in on the first paragraph – naturally! – in their ‘Blyth Spirit’:

“Blyth seafront… The biggest magnet for every lawless hood, crook and lowlife in the North East. Except perhaps Sunderland. And some parts of Middlesbrough.”

Of course Britain’s Spirit is going to be bonkers – bonkers, and a bit BEANO.

You’ll be in for a completely different twist from John M Burns (2000 AD’S GREATEST etc) which is ever so contemporary and cool. Such delicious figure work there, with his unmistakeably rich, old-school colour palette.

Finally, Jason Latour (LOOSE ENDS etc) goes for more of a montage effect (above), breaking the collection up brilliantly, nailing Will Eisner’s rain, displaying his broad knowledge of Eisner’s legacy outside of the obvious, making his Spirit ethereal but the very opposite of ephemeral.

Oh yes, sorry: proceeds from sales will go to LICAF’s Creators’ Development Fund. That is exceptionally cool!

SLH

Buy Spirit Centenary Newspaper (Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2017) and read the Page 45 review here

Starting (£5-00, LICAF) by Chris Gooch, Marc Jackson, Luke McGarry, John Martz, Mikiko, Jake Phillips.

“In the beginning there was nothing.
“Then there was Kevin,
“And Kevin was hungry.”

Everything has to start somewhere.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and sometimes it’s that often very daunting challenge that prevents or delays all manner of things from communication, creativity, going outside or moving forward in any meaningful manner to ditching a bad habit, tackling an addiction or perhaps turning over a lesser new leaf.

In my Page 45 Staff Profile I wrote:

Which qualities do you least admire in yourself?
Procrastination when I know something definitely needs to be done – all in the vain hope that it doesn’t!

Once I get started I find that I’m fine, but it can prove a struggle for some of us, and so it is in a couple of these stories, but let us first return to Kevin, for he is very hungry.

“He began to feast on the nothingness around him.
“As he ate he expanded.
“But he couldn’t stop.”

So there’s the flipside: sometimes once you’ve started, you simply can’t stop. However, once you’ve digested Jake Phillips’s full four pages alongside their visuals, you might feel very grateful that Kevin consumes. It really is a cosmically quick-witted comic with at least four starting processes, one of which I will leave you to discover for yourself.

Each of the six comicbook creators fashioned a four-page story in the space of four hours on the subject of STARTING. Immediately afterwards they were collated and printed in the form of this anthology, published and on sale the very next day on Saturday 14th October during LICAF 2017. That was a truly Herculean endeavour and monumental achievement by contributor Marc Jackson who had to learn it all on the hoof. If anyone started something astonishing for the first time here, it is he.

Like last year’s LICAF anthology COELIFER ATLAS (reviewed and still on sale for worldwide distribution by Page 45) every single penny of its £5 cover-price continues to go directly from Page 45 to LICAF without us taking a retail cut: thence to OCDAction in the case of COELIFER ATLAS to provide support and information to those affected by OCD and raise awareness amongst the wider public; or in this instance split between OCDAction and LICAF’s Creator Development Fund.

COELIFER ATLAS is a single story told in a relay race between artists that deals directly and eloquently and startlingly with OCD itself, whereas the remit of STARTING is all in its title and, like Jake Phillips’s contribution, once you’ve had time to consider each one properly then multiple beginnings become clear.

Chris Gooch’s cold blue opening offering takes place at the dentist during a check-up on teen Johnny’s braces. He’s just started a new school. But Johnny started something else a long time ago and he’s already started again. Now his dentist starts something else in the hope that he’ll stop. How dark do you like your comics?

With frantic lettering more exuberant than I can match here and eye-frazzling lines that refuse to sit still, Marc Jackson’s about to start using a Wacom and draws a robot. But the robot starts making demands:

“Can you draw me a wife? I’m going to get lonely in here!”
“You got it, Robo Man!”
“Make sure she has lots of rivets, I love rivets!
“O… kay…”

It won’t end there, but where will it?

Equally on the product-placement ball, Luke McGarry begins receiving strange visitors just as Donald Trump starts World War Three (next Tuesday it says on my calendar) then McGarry’s going to need to start keeping warm – one way or another.

John Martz of BURT’S WAY HOME and A CAT NAMED TIM is determined to start his first novel. As I say, everything has to start somewhere. You can crack your knuckles for as long as you like, but nothing beats hitting the keyboard. No, not with drum sticks! Faced with a blank screen, I honestly suggest that you simply start typing. I do that all the time. Plus, we no longer need to use Tippex.

Finally Mikiko’s young artist is off to many a false start, scrunching most of them up then lobbing them into the bin. I’m afraid it’s a bit full by now, but it all could be much worse as the penultimate page close-up makes clear. That’s ever so clever, I promise.

Six creators, four pages each, and not one of them coasting, even under such pressure.

SLH

Buy Starting and read the Page 45 review here

Moomin / LICAF 2017 Tote Bag (£5-00, LICAF) by Tove Jansson & Steve Kerner.

Yes, unless I have maxed out my memory and mislaid my marbles yet again, the iconic logo for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival was created by Steve Kerner; and I have to concede, such is my admiration, that I prefer it even to Page 45’s… just!

Meanwhile, behold young Moomintroll performing a back-flip / handstand with all the grace of Tom Daley on the very top diving board of an Olympic-size swimming pool! He is at peace – at one with his newfound, gymnastic equilibrium – and so will you be once you’ve purchased this in-store or online for worldwide distribution. The only question in-store is, “Do you want this to be the bag, or be in a bag?

This is printed in black on precisely the same colour and heavy-duty, graphic-novel-bearing cloth as the classic Page 45 Tote Bag  which is both a fashion statement and a status symbol.

Page 45 carries the complete range of the Janssons’ MOOMIN graphic novels as well as the very first Tove Jansson MOOMIN novel, THE MOOMINS AND THE GREAT FLOOD, and indeed Philip Ardagh’s new MOOMINVALLEY book. You know how to use our search engine, I’m sure.

SLH

Buy Moomin / LICAF 2017 Tote Bag and read the Page 45 review here

Michael Cho LICAF 2017 Print – Signed & Numbered (Of 50) (£25-00, LICAF) by Michael Cho.

What do you want me to say? It’s gorgeous, innit?

Sterling composition featuring the hills above Kendal where one man who bought the print said he walked his dog every day. He showed me exactly where.

This is one of the many things I love about LICAF: Entry is free so locals and tourists flood in to discover comics for the very first time. It’s a festival that truly reaches out.

The locals are lovelies. Kendal is kindness personified.

SLH

Buy Michael Cho LICAF 2017 Print – Signed & Numbered (Of 50) and read the Page 45 review here

Jonathan Edwards LICAF 2017 Print – Signed & Numbered (Of 50) (£25-00, LICAF) by Jonathan Edwards.

Jonathan Edwards had loads of his own prints on sale in our room – I bought two of those in 2016 and now I’m having this one, cheers.

I was chatting with Sean Phillips about Jonti’s process video of painting a waterfall and he said, “I have no idea how his brain works – to be able to translate what I see into what he sees… It’s astonishing.”

Our own Jonathan suspects he has some sort of prism glasses.

Anyway, Jonti (please call him Jonathan – never call him John – I’m allowed specially dispensation with “Jonti”) is the co-creator this year with Louise “Felt Mistress” Evans of the glorious Archipelagogo exhibition in Kendal inspired by Tove Jansson (photos below).

In our first year at LICAF FeltMistress came up to me in The Brewery bar and said, “I love your Georgian Room: it’s where all the cool kids hang out! Can we sit there next year?” She has a lovely Welsh lilt.

Obviously I screamed “YES!”

They’ve been with us ever since.

SLH

Buy Jonathan Edwards LICAF 2017 Print – Signed & Numbered (Of 50) and read the Page 45 review here

Ken Niimura LICAF 2016 Print – Signed & Numbered (Of 40) (£25-00, LICAF) by Ken Niimura.

I don’t have an image in front of me as I type this, but I was exceedingly grateful to Bryan Lee O’Malley for introducing us to Ken last year A) because he’s such an exceptionally gifted creator B) because he’s so sweet and C) because he promptly spent £150 in our Georgian Room on graphic novels which we then shipped across the ocean to him.

They would have exceeded his luggage allowance.

That was an awful review, I’m sorry.

SLH

Buy Ken Niimura LICAF 2016 Print – Signed & Numbered (Of 40) and read the Page 45 review here

LICAF Comics & Graphic Novels Still On Sale, Reviewed

Black Dog: The Dreams Of Paul Nash (£100-00, original LICAF edition signed and sketched on) by Dave McKean

Carrot To The Stars (£6-00, LICAF) by Regis Lejonc, Thierry Murat & Riff Reb’s (translation by Carole Tait)

Coelifer Atlas (£5-00, LICAF) by Alex Paknadel, Dan Watters & Charlie Adlard, Dan Berry, Nick Brokenshire, Joe Decie, Mike Medaglia, Bruce Mutard, Ken Niimura, Jake Phillips, Bryan Talbot, Craig Thompson, Petteri Tikkanen, Emma Vieceli.

How To Create Graphic Novels (£5-00, LICAF) by by Rodolphe Töpffer with John McShane

New Arrivals, Online & Ready To Buy!

Please scroll down: they’re all at the bottom! Meanwhile (photos mine unless stated otherwise) …

Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2017: Behold Beauty!

 

 

Oh wait — that’s Jonathan.

We were enraptured by Jonthan Edwards & Louise ‘Felt Mistress’ Evans’s Archipelagogo exhibition inspired by the works of MOOMIN’s Tove Jansson (still on in Kendal!), but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Let’s start again: Behold The Beauty!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh sorry — that’s Jonathan again.

Even in the rain and especially in Autumn, Cumbria is drop-dead romantic – which sounds a bit Keats!

Many of those photos were from our Friday morning stroll right around, up and above Grasmere Lake, a mere half-hour drive from Kendal.

But we’ll get to that again too, and Kendal itself is a town to fall in love with, full of intriguing alleys which promise hidden treasures and more open courtyards and twisted vistas to make your heart soar!

 

 

I do hope the Cumbrian Tourist Board is paying attention. If you could possibly pay Page 45’s hotel bill next year then we would be eternally grateful.

We adored Kendal’s Riverside Hotel where LICAF logistics Commander Carole Tait placed us this year.

Come to think of it, Riverside, you might consider giving us a freebie in 2018. The tourist board could perhaps pay for our petrol.

 

 

Basically this: it’s more pretty than a city!

An entire town en fête, as in Europe, dedicated to our shared love of comics!

One of the many things I love about LICAF is that entry to its core Kendal Comic Clock Tower is free so the locals flood in and swoon over glorious graphic novels and comics for the very first time!

 

 

 

It’s one great big loving outreach to everyone, and that is Page 45’s own Georgian Room, yes!

We were a little bit busy! We broke our own weekend record for the fourth consecutive year, taking over £10,000 and with just 1% of the range of our stock.

Essentially it’s all that we can fit in a van.

Here’s that process from start to finish, with Jonathan playing immaculate graphic novel / tight-van Tetris, and silly old me unpacking all the graphic novels then laying them out on tables until, after four hours, I am vaguely content that we’ve done our best to showcase our shared, beloved medium:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then along comes Oliver East with THE LANKY (brand-new and hot off the press – so I haven’t had time to review it yet, but every copy you buy from that link has kindly been sketched in for free!) and we have to make room for more!

Oliver signed in our room for half the festival along with his adorable son Hunter (a new joke every five minutes – too funny! – I want Hunter signing solo in our room next year!) who bought a 3-foot bag of what claimed to be over-sized Cheesy Wotsits for a quid. They looked like packing chips and tasted like packing chips.

Top-tip: if something looks and tastes like a packing chip, it probably is a packing chip.

 

 

 

We didn’t have to make room for Festival Patron Emma Vieceli and her new YA LGBT graphic novel BREAKS (reviewed) co-created with Malin Ryden because we’d already received that a fortnight before anyone else thanks to Soaring Penguin Press and we’d already sorted out space for Hannah Berry signing LIVESTOCK etc (also reviewed – basically, if I’ve linked to it, the graphic novel’s been reviewed) because, well, Hannah!

LIVESTOCK was one of our best-selling books of the Festival!

Here they all are: Emma Vieceli, Hannah Berry and the stellar Emmeline Pidgen signing and sketching in our Georgian Room.

So, so proud-making!

 

 

 

 

What we did part our graphic-novel Red-Sea for – like Moses – was the surprise, Exclusive Worldwide Book Launch of PORCELAIN III: IVORY TOWER!

We’d grabbed PORCELAIN‘s Ben Read and Chris Wildgoose from Improper Books (who were exhibiting elsewhere in the Kendal Clock Tower) for a Saturday signing but we had no idea that they could deliver book three in time for the Festival!

PORCELAIN II was Page 45’s biggest-selling book of 2015, even though it came out only in October, eclipsing 2-to-1 Neil Gaiman’s return to SANDMAN with SANDMAN: OVERTURE which is published by DC owned by Time Warner with its multi-billion-dollar advertising budget. PORCELAIN comes out of a British farmhouse!

Here’s Ben and Chris and indeed the legendary Paul Gravett who popped by for a chat.

 

 

 

Page 45’s free exclusive signed bookplate. I’d probably order right now!

 

 

We also had our GRANDVILLE V: FORCE MAJEURE book launch which totally sold out!

Big love to Volunteer-In-Chief Chris who with quick wit worked out a way to start the Bryan and Mary Talbot signing an hour early. But even then it lasted over four hours in total. The queues snaked back and back!

You want your copies early? I’d probably pre-order from Page 45 using that link. We Ship Worldwide! We have some signed and sketched-in bookplates to give out for free to the earliest birds.

 

 

 

Mary: “This queue is ridiculous!” Bryan didn’t stop until the last fan / reader was satisfied.

 

 

Oh, by totally sold out, I mean that we had no copies of the new GRANDVILLE graphic novel for sale on Sunday.

Still, I’d recommend the equally anthropomorphic BLACKSAD, which is what I did when the Talbot Tower came crashing down leaving but five graphic novels left standing plus that brilliant Bryan Talbot DVD. It’s in stock, by the way, whatever our website says: we simply haven’t unpacked it from all our boxes back home. My Mum adored the DVD, particularly the tour round the ONE BAD RAT Lakes District.

 

 

Anyway, we also had Jason and those amazing folks from Metaphrog, Sandra and John, signing with us too.

We’re a little bit lucky, you know, to have all these lovely creators giving up their time to sign for free.

I’m not sure why they do it. I’m not sure how they do it. Please think about this: they give up their time which they need so desperately to create and so earn money.

I’m a little bit in awe of all of them.

 

Oh! This photo’s by Jonathan! I spy customers Stephen and Dee Mortiboy in the background! You’ll see them again later. And so did I. For which I was grateful! 😉

 

 

Lastly, we welcomed that dear man Sean Phillips whom you may have seen mentioned above, Festival Patron and artist on KILL OR BE KILLED, CRIMINAL, USER, THE FADE OUT, FATALE and so much more. I may have reviewed those (I did, at length and each one in-depth). The hardcovers are the best reviews, even if you buy the softcovers, because by that point I’ve had time to truly digest the whole. No spoilers, I promise you: even when you read a fifth’s book review, I will not ruin book one.

Here he is signing copies of the LICAF EXCLUSIVE SPIRIT NEWSPAPER whose printing he paid for himself, and his own rubbish comics.

 

 

 

Have we all done now?

I’d like to take a break. Somewhere beautiful, perhaps.

I would particularly like to take time out to drink on this glorious Riverside Hotel balcony.

By day or by night.

You could do that while visiting the Lakes International Comic Art Festival.

 

 

 

You might enjoy this view opposite from the Riverside Hotel which might consider paying our basic board next year, but even if they don’t then THEY ARE ADORED.

 

 

Seriously, everyone has been lovely.

Exhibitors helping each other: our Jonathan, I believe, even fixed someone’s wonky credit-card machine on Sunday morning! The best volunteers in the world are forever at your side and Colin, the man who commands the keys to the Kendal Clock Tower, let us in early, out late, and could not do enough for us. The volunteers pretty much made me cry with their heart-felt conviction.

We go out with some photo-blasts. firstly from the Will Eisner original art exhibition (I love seeing the deployment of white-out)…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That last one is exactly what I meant when I wrote the “comicbook king of gesticulation”.

Now bask in some bucolic beauty, persuading you perhaps to come to next year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival because we had a gas around Grasmere Lake.

It’s just up the semi-submerged, water-flooded road!

 

 

 

 

 

You know, I’m not entirely sure that even was a waterfall before last week.

And now, back to the Archipelagogo!

This exhibition by Jonathan Edwards and Louise Evans is still on show in Kendal!

 

 

 

 

Me in the mirror: I couldn’t resist!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Splinters are just wood’s way of shaking hands.”

Brilliant!

Lastly, THIS NEVER HAPPENED!

 

This photo’s by Jonathan too. Obviously!

 

Big love to Page 45 customers Stephen and Dee Mortimer for the “lift” back to our hotel on Saturday evening! What am I like?

But everyone needs a helping hand, now and again, and that’s what LICAF is all about!

Come to The Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2018 from October 12th to 14th and find out for yourself!

Big love as ever to Festival Director Julie Tait for her unwavering encouragement and support.

Have some BBC LICAF coverage!

– Stephen

Proud Patron of The Lakes International Comic Art Festival

Read more about The Lakes International Comic Art Festival on Page 45’s dedicated LICAF page.

New Arrivals, Online & Ready To Buy!

New reviews to follow, but if they’re new formats of previous books, reviews may already be up; others will retain their Diamond previews information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.

Porcelain vol 3: Ivory Tower (£14-99, Improper Books) by Benjamin Read & Chris Wildgoose WITH FREE SIGNED BOOKPLATE EXCLUSIVE TO PAGE 45!

The Worm And The Bird (£14-99, Particular Books) by Coraline Bickford-Smith

Relatable Content (£10-00, self-published) by Lizz Lunney

Street Dawgz: Boxlife (£5-00, ) by Lizz Lunney

The Lanky (£10-00, self-published or LICAF) by Oliver East

The Wolf, The Duck & The Mouse (£12-99, Walker Books) by Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

Bottled (£17-99, Top Shelf) by Chris Gooch

Giant Days vol 6 (£13-99, Boom! Box) by John Allison & Max Sarin

Harrow County vol 5: Abandoned s/c (£12-50, Dark Horse) by Cullen Bunn & Carla Speed McNeil, Tyler Crook

I Hate Fairyland vol 3: Good Girl  (£14-99, Image) by Skottie Young

Marney The Fox h/c (£17-99, Rebellion) by Scott Goodall & John Stokes

Mr Higgins Comes Home h/c (£13-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola & Warwick Johnson

Baltimore vol 8: The Red Kingdom h/c (£22-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden & Peter Bergting

Rashomon: A Commissioner Heigo Kobayashi Case h/c (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Victor Santos

Rock & Pop (£4-00, ) by Tim Bird

The Rocket (£4-00, ) by Tim Bird

The Tea Dragon Society h/c (£15-99, Oni) by Katie O’Neill

The Wild Storm vol 1 s/c (£14-99, DC) by Warren Ellis & Jon Davis-Hunt

Guardians Of The Galaxy – An Awesome Digest s/c (£8-99, Marvel) by various

Spider-Gwen vol 4: Predators s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Jason Latour, Hannah Blumenreich & Robbi Rodriguez, Hannah Blumenreich

Inuyashiki vol 8 (£10-99, Kodansha) by Hiroya Oku

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews October 2017 week two

Wednesday, October 11th, 2017

Featuring Robert Kirkman & Charlie Adlard’s Walking Dead: Here’s Negan! story which was never published in the regular Walking Dead comic series! OMG it is brand-new to you! Also, Nilah Magruder, Alexis Deacon. William Gibson, Butch Guice Katriona Chapman, Mike Medaglia, John Klassen, Konstantin Steshenko. I do hope my spelling’s been up to all that!

M.F.K. h/c (£16-99, Insight Comics) by Nilah Magruder.

Out in the vast, open desert a storm is brewing: a storm of sand, and a storm of confrontation and conflict.

Hopelessly through one and haplessly into the other staggers young, wounded Abbie with her beautiful feathered steed, a giant, speckle-breasted moa.

Exhausted, the moa doesn’t make it, but thanks to the determined and instinctive intervention of Jaime and his grandfather, Iman, Abbie is carefully carried back to the sheltered safety of their family house in their remote town, all alone in the desiccating dunes. As they do so, a blue-and-black-furred jackal-like rakuna watches carefully, cautiously, yet knowingly.

“They’re the servants of Raku,” explains Jaime’s Aunt Nifrain, “Deva of long journeys. And difficult times.”

 

She’s seen a rakuna once before, many years ago, and she will see another shortly.

Abbie’s journey has already been long and she has far further to go in these difficult times, for she seeks to carry her dead mother’s ashes in a fragile urn up  to the mountain range called the Potter’s Spine, there to scatter them and mourn in private.

For the moment, however, haunted by dreams of her dearly departed, she must take time to recuperate in the company of Jaime, Iman and Nefrain.

There’ll be no peace and quiet, but recover she will, for Auntie Nifrain is a doctor with a fiery temper and a very sharp knife, determined that her patients will be healed whether they like it or not! Nurse Nefrain will not brook a bad patient, and even fiercely independent Abbie will have to do as she’s told – for now…

Nor is the wider town life any less loud, for it is constantly beset by roaming, opportunistic Parasai demanding tributes from the poor population. These Parasai look like anyone else, but have tremendous strength and psychokinetic powers which they once used to aid those in need but now take from them instead. One comes off like an anti-Desperate-Dan, even juggling a cow for good measure. But basically they have sunk to the low level of bullies and the town’s mayor does nothing but appease.

“We’re a humble people here. We know our place in the world, and we have no trouble with paying what’s due to those who are better.”

Such low self-esteem!

“All we ask is to live our lives in peace.”

He adds, later, “Treasures can be remade. Lives cannot. You’d do well to teach your grandson, Iman.”

The trouble is that they cannot and are not living their lives in peace while these public raids continue.

But what, do you think, has any of this to do with Abbie?

More all-ages excellence which will thrill, chill and get you right riled up, but which will also take you in unexpected directions and make you laugh as it does so. There is some exquisite, slapstick visual comedy, a running gag about badly made pigeon soup and one page that had me howling with its pitch-perfect timing involving an unattended window, four steaming-hot potato buns and an unfortunate cat.

I so do wish I could find that and perhaps I will before we go to publication but in case we can’t it’ll give you something to really look forward to!

Here you go! – Stephen

The same thing goes for an air-punching moment of cactus catharsis, but I’m saying nothing.

Nilah Magruder isn’t afraid to mix up the art with a plethora of clever comedic devices, one utilising both form and colour for a frozen, statuesque moment of mortified horror during an accident accentuated with the beauty which precedes it in the form of an intricate, delicately blown, marigold-coloured glass figurine. Again, though: there will be surprises!

On a more serious note, this album-sized graphic novel also deals sensitively with subjects like loss, loneliness, isolation and independence, along with family matters, and does so partly with ever so expressive eyes.

Abbie, for example, isn’t the only individual left without parents. Jaime’s mother had an incurable, innate wanderlust, so she left him when young to be looked after by her father and sister Nifrain. They’ve never considered Jaime a burden, but that doesn’t mean that Jaime has thought the same way.

I don’t know either way, but I do wonder if the jackal-like rakuna draws on the same mythology as the apparition in Leila Del Duca & Kit Seaton’s AFAR? Either way, I would watch out for that as you watch out for each other – a concept very much at the heart of this journey.

I don’t think that it’s over.

What a tremendously bright, profoundly moving and highly intriguing punchline!

SLH

Buy M.F.K. h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Geis Book 2: A Game Without Rules (£15-99, Nobrow) by Alexis Deacon.

“This is magic.
“This is life.
“It is the will that shapes the world.”

Remember this also:

“There can be no magic without life.
“To make magic, life must be given or it must be taken.
“Student of magic, your first question is this:
“How much will you take?
“How much will you give?”

For something so dark, there is so much bright light and the most radiant of colours to match!

Also life-lessons we would all do so well to learn: give what you can and take only your time. Consider this: what if they were me?

Diabolically ingenious and so cleverly constructed, every element here dovetails precisely, be it the multiple, intense, concurrent action sequences of both fight and flight or the games and the geis itself, all of which most assuredly have rules if only our remaining competitors could perceive then strive to understand them. You, the reader, will have to work out what they are too, so I will merely allude!

What are those who have reached the supposed sanctuary of the castle competing for? The kingdom itself. What is at stake? Their very lives.

Unfortunately they don’t know that. Only young Lady Io and the duplicitous Nemas have discovered this, and they have been cursed into silence.

“Why don’t you just kill us now and have done with it?”
“I cannot. The Geis binds us all alike.  You are bound to be tried and I am bound to test you. This bond cannot be broken.”

This is true. The sorceress Niope may not interfere directly. But what if those tests were to include individual temptation?

In GEIS BOOK 1: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH we saw the greedy and the opportunistic as well as those who thought they could bring justice all sign themselves up to compete for the kingdom after their matriarch passed away. But from her corpse materialised the sorceress Niope, old and haggard and blue, who issued their first challenge: to reach the castle before sunrise. Some gave up and went home; they did not live long to regret it.

Lady Io never signed up but found herself embroiled all the same. She assumed that her wealthy parents entered her. They hadn’t. In her efforts to save others she has been burned by the life-giving sun, then poisoned by Nemas. Still she saved his life, but in doing so she may well have condemned everyone else to death.

GEIS BOOK 1 was so phenomenal that we made it Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month and has sold in droves to adults and Young Adults alike, but Book 2 is on another level entirely, forty pages longer, even more beautiful, and far more complex as the stakes and so struggles are ramped up dramatically in direct confrontations.

We begin with a telling prologue from Nemas’s youth in which his identical twin Caliphas invented an innocent, imaginary game to play, along with its goals, its rules and its risks. Their elder brother Toras bullied his way in, threatening to beat Nemas to death with brute strength. Now Toras is a general, Caliphas an architect and Nemas has a chip on his shoulder the size of a wooden stake.

Also key in this second of three instalments are Nelson the doctor, little Artur the bookkeeper who’s lost his spectacles,  their friend the wizard Eloise who has a third eye and so vision, and good-hearted but blundering Count Julius who doesn’t stand a chance on his own.

Then there’s cunning advocate Malmo and his bitter old tutor Tomas who turn the law into a game of recrimination in order to settle old scores. As to Law itself, it’s a loquacious albino raven which was once rescued from its stronger sibling’s attempts to push it out of their nest by The Judge who as a girl learned a prime lesson there and then:

“Law… It must be built upon a single question. It must ask, what if it was me?
“What if I was weak? What if I was strong?
“What if I were the one? What if I were the other.”

She adds:

“The law is no game.
“The law is all that stands between us…
“And the dominion of monsters.”

Are you intrigued? It is time for the second challenge to begin!

“I divide you into two.
“Play the game until one side alone remains.”

Niope dips her now far healthier hand to the throne-room floor and in a flash the castle is cleaved clean in two: one side is white, one side is black.

The contestants / combatants are also cleaved in two, thrown flat on their backs from the monochromatic chasm, their colourful clothing instantly bleached or blackened. Unlike upon a chessboard, however, her black pieces lie on white ground, her white ones on black. Nothing I type here is random.

“Keep to the rules at all times or you will be removed from the contest.”
“What are the rules?”
“What rules?”
“You haven’t told us what they are!”

And she won’t.

“I give each of you two gifts. Do with them what you will.”

Each receives a large coin which they then choose to wear as medallions (engraved on one is “Take”; on the other side “Give”) and a staff or perhaps stick according to colour: chalk for white, charcoal for black. Beneath their very feet they find ancient writing which the learned Judge alone can translate:

“As it is written, so shall it be.”

Now, what do you think that implies? They’ll have to figure it out for themselves.

The sequential-art storytelling is exceptional, not least because Deacon refuses to hold your hot, sticky hands with explicatory words, but instead successfully supplies you and the contestants with all the clues you will need within the art or they in their environs. I cannot begin to tell you how much respect such narrative confidence commands in me. The instant effect of what is hidden within one panel is essential for what follows but it resolutely remains un-signposted so, in the spirit of which, somewhere within this review, I have supplied a page of interior art without comment just as Deacon does. Boy, is it ever so clever!

While we are reaching for superlatives, several sequences struck me as modern manifestations of LITTLE NEMO’s Winsor McCay, not least the page I refer to above but also its equally magical tip-toe through the proverbial, bell-ringing tulips. Or in this case, giant mushrooms.

“Whatever you do, stay in the contest!” screams Lady Io, and I am in awe of her altruism.

As to the central challenge, our bewildered, embattled ones must each make their own up games and write their own rules. Those rules will require quick wit and attention to detail: the very letter of the law, you might say.

The pen may prove mightier than the sword; although sometimes the former can also be utilised as the latter.

It’s all very black and white, with one side fighting the other. Or is it? Please read this review once again.

SLH

Buy Geis Book 2: A Game Without Rules and read the Page 45 review here

One Year Wiser: An Illustrated Guide To Mindfulness (£12-99, SelfMadeHero) by Mike Medaglia…

“Love is everything.
“It really is.
“Such an abstract concept. Super hard to define in words. But the fact of its existence is undeniable.
“Love is safety.
“Love is purpose.
“Love is learning who we are as individuals through the way we love others.
“Love is our greatest antidote to hate.”

Very true. From a Buddhist perspective love really is absolutely everything. Even hate, which at its root is, in fact, merely a twisted, malformed version of love. You find many such pearls of wisdom in this latest treatise from Mike ‘Now Several Years Wiser thanks to ONE YEAR WISER 365 ILLUSTRATED MEDITATIONS / ONE YEAR WISER A GRATITUDE JOURNAL / ONE YEAR WISER 2018 ART CALENDAR Medaglia. Not the least of which is that the simple practise of mindfulness will get you on that path to acquiring your own moments, days, months and indeed years of wisdom.

All of which will be very hard won, but very worthwhile. The rewards, though, of seeing one’s own true nature and being able to achieve a degree of tranquillity and equanimity are truly joyful and self-nourishing.  For whilst the practice may indeed be simple, it is the continuing work of a lifetime. But start with a mere moment or two and you’ll soon be very glad you began your own personal empowering promenade, believe me.

Here, over a series of four sections titled as the seasons of the year, Mike talks us through twenty-four varied topics such as the all important Mindfulness, and Meditation, but also diverse jewels like Smiling, Anxiety, The Ego and Impermanence. I note, purely for my own amusement, that the first time Mike sprang fully formed to our attention, was with his superlative SEASONS, featuring four vignettes ruminating not only meteorologically, but metaphorically on the passing of time. I didn’t know at the time he was a fellow Zen practitioner, but it didn’t come as any surprise when I found out.

All the twenty-four chapters in this work are powerfully affecting, in subtly different ways, both in their words and accompanying artwork. I should probably add at this point, that this is a work which can neither be pigeonholed under the description illustrated prose or comics. For it is emphatically a wonderful synthesis hybrid of both! I also totally approve of Mike’s use of his own talking head as occasional narrator, often with a personal salient observation on his own practice, or indeed simply himself! It helps remind the reader that this is indeed not just an academic text, but a very practical handbook.

And it’s not just a primer for beginners, either. There’s a conceit within Zen that is often referred as the layers of the onion. You can think you have attained all the wisdom you might possibly do so about a certain point or topic, but then something in your currently held paradigm will shift and you realise that there is indeed yet another layer to said vegetable and deeper understanding to be found. Thus reading works such as this can be just as enlightening to long term practitioners as novitiates approaching the subject for the very first time with trepidation.

For a subject as ineffable and as ungraspable as mindfulness Mike’s is an ideal approach for revealing and refreshing the knowledge of the universal truths we manage to so successfully obscure from ourselves on a daily basis. We do already know deep down that love is everything, and many other such powerful, profound truths that could aid us in any moment were we to able to keep them to mind. We just need to sit still long enough for our minds to calm down and our natural innate wisdom and knowledge to (re-)appear and replenish our daily selves.

So a big thank you Mike for this wonderful gift to us all… even if we’re then going to make all you good folks pay for it! I highly recommend buying one for yourself and then multiple copies for everyone else you know. Remember, love is everything, and nothing says it like a lovely gift.*

* This is not strictly true, but go on, why not treat them, and yourself?

PSSSST. If you want to treat yourself to two bonus topics / chapters, or perhaps merely dip your toe into Mike’s World Of Mindfulness to get you started, I can heartily recommend his recent two self-published minis POVERTY OF THE HEART and RUSHING FROM A TO A.

JR

Buy One Year Wiser: An Illustrated Guide To Mindfulness and read the Page 45 review here

Katzine: The Guatemala Issue (£5-50, self-published) by Katriona Chapman.

Yet anotherhttp://www.page45.com/store/Katzine-The-Guatemala-Issue.html rich, classy cover for the self-published series which has truly set the new, top-end benchmark for comics of any origin in terms of production values as well as engrossing content.

Wouldn’t huge publishers do well to follow suit and lavish their readers with much-to-be-treasured art objects such as these, rather than immensely enjoyable but arguably throwaway pamphlets?

I’ve said this before but I reckon it’s worth repeating that within each KATZINE Katriona always has something to impart born of her considerable, personal and broad experience that is so worthwhile your time and attention.

She releases them only with careful forethought as to what might genuinely command and so demand her readers’ interest, and with due diligence as to their soft-focus, pencil-shaded and humane execution. By which I mean that Chapman brings individuals alive, giving them their unique depths and perspectives, each and every one.

Here we are treated to not only a preview of her forthcoming long-form graphic novel of travel which you will never again see in this richest of blacks, whites and greys but in full colour (I adore both!), but the most arresting of group-thefts while back-packing in Guatemala.

Chapman’s fellow travellers gather together somewhat despondently but determinedly and between them they piece together the evidence until they logically come to the conclusion that one particular party or its entourage must be responsible. Still retaining the beyond-altruistic, kind and commendable, deep-seated desire that they not offend anyone, hurt their feelings or in any way falsely accuse, they do reluctantly – and with great grace – summon the courage to broach this breach in trust with carefully considered words.

Personally, I was in awe. But what happens next?

Characteristically, Chapman then proceeds to contrast and so mitigate this understandable disappointment in human nature with an uplifting series of cameo accounts of ‘Nice Things’: her many experiences of strangers going beyond the call of anyone’s duty to act in charitable ways when either she or her boyfriend Sergio have been in trouble.

That’s balance, that is. But it’s more than that: it’s a deep-seated sensitivity to her readers’ sensibilities and a care that we don’t despair.

SLH

Buy Katzine: The Guatemala Issue and read the Page 45 review here

Archangel h/c (£18-99, Other A-Z) by William Gibson & Butch Guice…

“Mr. Vice President, please remain still… as I remove the bandages. The final procedure was entirely successful. See for yourself.”
“Granddaddy was a good looking man.”
“They know nothing of D.N.A., so they’ll have no way of knowing you’re not him. You should have no difficulties assuming his identity.”

So why would the Vice President of the United States of America want to travel back in time to February 1945 and replace his relative, one Major Aloysius Henderson of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the C.I.A? Well, given it seems like there has been some sort of catastrophic global nuclear conflict, judging from the scenes of total devastation in Tokyo, Moscow and London that we get a glimpse of on the opening page dated February 2016, I suspect altering the course of history might be high on the VP’s to-do list. A list entitled ‘Archangel’.

Not that it seems everyone on the experimental Quantum Transfer project is of the same mindset. The chief scientist Torres, who seems to have a pretty good idea of precisely who is to blame for the current highly radioactive state of the environment, has just enough remaining quantum transfer juice to send a stealth fighter and two marines back as well, to try and foil the VP’s plot. Except whilst the first time jump works perfectly, the second, well, let’s just say there are some unexpected complications. The action then shifts to 1945 where the various Allied intelligence services suddenly find themselves with a rather perplexing puzzle to solve.

This the first crack at comics from the acclaimed cyberpunk author, and I must say, on the whole, I’m certainly impressed as he avoids the pitfalls most first-timers, even big names, can find themselves tumbling headlong into. ARCHANGEL has the serious speculative feel of say, Greg Rucka’s LAZARUS, which I think from the tone of the writing and cast of characters is probably the most obvious comparison to make. There are some fabulous bits of dialogue too, particularly in the WW2 era between various spies who seem just as concerned with getting one over each other as dealing with the situation in hand, which also minded me of Brubaker’s VELVET.

Gibson can certainly write decent comics based on this outing. There was an interminable delay getting the monthly issues out during the run of singles, which did rather disrupt my enjoyment at the time, but happily, in the collected form, it all runs very smoothly. Just not for the characters… any of them at all in fact. I did slyly enjoy Gibson’s afterword which talks about revising his ‘alternate time-track story’ as he went along. I know he probably wasn’t referring to the publishing schedule but it did make me giggle. Amongst other plot points, he’s actually very specifically referring to the epilogue, which again, caused me to occasion a very wry smile. I thought it a rather fitting conclusion.

The art from Butch Guice is excellent, fans of his work on THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA and WINTER SOLDIER will know what to expect. I always feel he’s like a slightly grittier version of Bryan Hitch though here he most reminds me of Michael Lark’s work on LAZARUS, actually. Not sure if Gibson has any further plans to write more comics, this apparently started life as a screenplay before discussions with IDW led to it being commissioned as a comics series. But I’d love to see him tackle a longer speculative fiction series, something which acclaimed horror author Joe Hill did superbly for IDW with his LOCKE & KEY epic.

JR

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

Walking Dead: Here’s Negan! (£17-99, Image) by Robert Kirkman & Charlie Adlard…

“You pull your pud that slow, fuckwit?!
“GAME POINT!
“If I had a wrist that weak, I’d need three pictures of your mom to blow my load.
“Now which one of you little pricks is next?”

“Sorry, Coach Negan. Josh has always been kind of a pussy. I’ll try to calm him down.”

And so, the big secret is finally out!! Not the full story of Lucille, but we will get to that, rest assured. No, fans of the man we all love to hate have often pondered precisely what Negan did for a living back in the pre-apocalyptic world. The rumour for a while was that of used car salesman, which I could see, but actually, demented P.E. teacher makes far more sense.

In many ways, he does remind me of a certain junior school games teacher of mine called [REDACTED] who always seemed part-clown / part-concentration camp commandant. One minute he was laughing and joking with us all, the next dispensing immense knee grippers and one-eared full-body-lifts for no apparent reason whatsoever.

I do very vividly remember a certain incident as an eight year old when I got chewing gum stuck in my hair on a school trip and [REDACTED] took just a bit too much pleasure in cutting it out with the serrated blade on his Swiss Army knife. The glint in his eye as he approached me was probably how the cowboys felt when they were out of ammo and that fashionable new haircut that the Native American Indian barbers were offering free of charge beckoned. I should just be grateful he wasn’t using a barbed-wire-encrusted baseball bat, I suppose!

I digress.

Fans of the WALKING DEAD will already have known that Negan’s favourite skull pinyata smasher was named after his late wife. What we get in this collection of material that first appeared in the excellent Image Plus previews magazine (not in the regular comics), is the heartbreaking end of their marital story, pre-apocalypse, and then how Negan gradually evolved / devolved, depending on your point of view, into the chilling, <ahem> articulate dictator he then subsequently became.

He clearly always had the gags, having polished his material ad nauseam no doubt on his young wards, but was he always such a complete and utter dick, or did he once have a romantic homespun heart of gold? As ever, with the man we really, really do love to utterly despise, it will not surprise you to learn he was always, shall we say, a… complex character… with hidden, slightly odious depths.

As good as any regular WALKING DEAD arc, if you are a fan, you will want this, trust me. Yes, it’s a little slim, and it has unfortunately been released as a hardcover first, thus being a different size to all those twenty eight trades you have on your shelves, but it is riveting, essential reading.

I have no idea whether the success of this arc will prove the spur to do any further prequel comics material featuring other significant characters. The Governor received his own similar treatment with the well received quadrilogy of prose novels, which are still available should anyone wish us to order them in. I can’t say there is any real need for exploring the back stories of other characters, though I really wouldn’t be adverse to volume two of Negan’s…

JR

Buy Walking Dead: Here’s Negan! and read the Page 45 review here

Screwed Up (£5-99, Adhouse Books) by Konstantin Steshenko.

Too, too funny!

It is a terrible truth that some marriage proposals swim more smoothly than others.

Some suitors are imaginative, some are so witty; others are eloquent and indeed dextrous, performing this most sacred but fun rite or ritual with elan! I hear to this day of several taking the more traditional root of proposing to their parents-in-law first, which strikes me as both funny and very romantic.

However it comes, however it goes and however the proposal is received, I wish each and every one of you the best in its success and your future happiness!

This proposal, I’m afraid, is a proverbial car crash that takes place far too close to a train track.

Darkness ensues.

 

It many ways I’d compare it to Jason Shiga’s DEMON (cue instant increase in sales!) for its optimism, its pessimism, its staged performance, its utter outrage and one other element that I cannot reveal. Also in this: we really shouldn’t laugh, but I did.

Truly, I must be a monster.

And I am going to leave it there.

SLH

Buy Screwed Up and read the Page 45 review here

New Edition / Classic Review

We Found A Hat s/c (£6-99, Walker Books) by Jon Klassen.

“We found a hat.
“We found it together.
“But there is only one hat.
“And there are two of us.”

So the dilemma begins…

“It looks good on both of us.
“But it would be right if one of us had a hat and the other did not.”

Awww! Kind and considerate, brotherly love!

They’ll just have to leave it where they found it, in the middle of the desert, right? Hmmm…

This is the third and final instalment of Klassen’s hat-trick trilogy which began with I WANT MY HAT BACK followed by THIS IS NOT MY HAT. I can only assume that Klassen suffered some sort of hat-related trauma during his formative years, for in each of first two an item of headgear is stolen. Neither ends well for the thief, and quite right too!

Deliciously, what looked on the surface like straightforward illustrated prose was, in fact, comics; for without the images all would have been lost. The pictures began in perfect accordance with the written word, but swiftly started shedding controversial or even contradictory light on what was being said. Howls of laughter from me and every youngster I’ve seen being shown the books on our shop floor.

The simplicity of what’s said is of equal importance – there is an identifiable Klassen cadence – for when the rhythm is first broken in I WANT MY HAT BACK, that’s when you suspect that something is up.

Here we are presented with a three-act play, and although I promise you that Klassen will not prove predictable, there will of course be an equally mischievous break between overt claim and covert curiosity, with its attendant hiccup in the otherwise rhythmic beat.

Also recommended by Jon Klassen and written by Mac Barnett: EXTRA YARN and SAM & DAVE DIG A HOLE plus TRIANGLE.

SLH

Buy We Found A Hat s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

New reviews to follow, but if they’re new formats of previous books, reviews may already be up; others will retain their Diamond previews information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.

A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars h/c (£15-99, Greenwillow) by Seth Fishman & Isabel Greenberg

Coady & The Creepies s/c (£13-99, Boom! Box) by Liz Prince & Amanda Kirk

Dark Souls vol 3: Legends Of The Flame (£13-99, Titan) by George Mann & Alan Quah

Harrow County vol 6: Hedge Magic s/c (£15-99, Dark Horse) by Cullen Bunn & Tyler Crook

Hellboy In Hell Library Edition h/c (£44-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola

Hookjaw – Classic Collection h/c (£29-99, Titan) by Pat Mills, Ken Armstrong & Ramon Sola, Juan Arrancio, Eric Bradbury, Feliz Carrion, Jim Bleach

How Comics Work (£16-99, Rotovision Books) by Dave Gibbons, Tim Pilcher

Last Driver (£11-99, Dead Canary Comics) by C.S. Baker & Shaky Kane

Letters For Lucardo vol 1 (£13-99, Iron Circus Comics) by Noora Heikkila

Low vol 4: Outer Aspects Of Inner Attitudes (£14-99, Image) by Rick Remender & Greg Tocchini

Mega Robo Bros vol 2: Mega Robo Rumble (£9-99, David Fickling Books) by Neill Cameron

Predator Vs. Judge Dredd Vs. Aliens: Splice & Dice s/c (£15-99, Dark Horse) by John Layman & Chris Mooneyham

Rat Queens vol 4: High Fantasies  (£13-99, Image) by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Owen Gieni

Seven To Eternity vol 2: Ballad Of Betrayal s/c (£14-99, Image) by Rick Remender & Jerome Opena, James Harren

Star Wars: Screaming Citadel s/c (£15-99, Marvel) by Kieron Gillen, Jason Aaron & Marco Checchetto, Salvador Larroca, Andrea Broccardo

Stumptown vol 1 s/c (£8-99, Oni) by Greg Rucka & Matthew Southworth

The World Of Moominvalley (£35-00, Macmillan) by Tove Jansson

Batman / The Flash: The Button Deluxe Edition h/c (£17-99, DC) by Joshua Williamson, Tom King & Jason Fabok, Howard Porter

DC Comics Bombshells vol 5: Death Of Illusion s/c (£14-99, DC) by Marguerite Bennett & various

Avengers By Bendis Complete Collection vol 2 s/c (£35-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Bryan Hitch, John Romita Jr., Renato Guedes, Chris Bachalo, Daniel Acuna

Avengers: Standoff s/c (£31-99, Marvel) by Nick Spencer, various & Mark Bagley, various

Goodnight Punpun vol 7 (£9-99, Viz) by Inio Asano

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews October 2017 week one

Wednesday, October 4th, 2017

Featuring Reinhard Kleist, Mathieu Bablet, Jeff Lemire, Alex Alice, Kyle Higgins, Alec Siegel, Rod Reis, Kevin Sacco, Nick Cave and Jeremy Corbyn!!!

Castle In The Stars vol 1: The Space Race Of 1869 h/c (£14-99, First Second) by Alex Alice.

“Have you never feared the dark? Or loneliness, sorrow, pain, rejection… or death?
“The great truth that myths have to teach us is not that dragons exist, but that they can be conquered.
“Show me a man who has triumphed over his fears…
“And I will show you a dragon-slayer.”

Top of the range, album-sized, all-ages excellence which had me enraptured: thrilled by its visual majesty, gripped by its power-play, charmed by its adroitly delivered, wholly unexpected comedic notes, then caught anchor, line and balloon-ballast in its steam-punk spell.

I strongly suspect that you’ll weep with wonderment at the Aethership blueprints which herald chapter three. I’ll have those for you shortly.

Meanwhile, let me show you the lovely lilt in the language as young Seraphin Dulac awakens in a guest room of King Ludwig II’s vast Bavarian “Swan’s Rock” castle high above a dense forest of alpine trees and milky lakes:

 

 

“The first note fills the sky from the shores of the lake to the still-starry zenith.
“The next one makes me open my eyes, and yet the dream continues…
“Except it’s not a dream…”

There Alex Alice perfectly captures the dawning realisation when waking up in a strange bed that isn’t your own and throwing open the windows to an unexpected spectacle.

Said spectacle is, of course, the multi-turreted white-stoned “Wow!” that is Neuschwanstein Castle, constructed on such a sheer mountainous outcrop that I’ve always thought not just “Wow!” but “How?!?”

Alice makes the most of the vertigo-inducing terrain over and over again with iron gantries spanning the slopes, cable lifts suspended high up in the sky and the sort of magical, arched glasshouse laboratory that you’d find in computer games like Riven and Myst, buttressed out from the escarpment and over a waterfall!

 

 

There is precise method in all this mechanical madness, I promise you, for there is something under construction.

We begin a year earlier in France with Seraphin’s mother, Claire Dulac, all set to ascend in a hot air balloon much to her engineer husband’s vocal consternation, for he sees a storm coming. Also, Archibald firmly believes that her particular quest is a fool’s errand.

“It’s been more than 2,000 years since the Greeks proposed the idea of aether, and no one has ever proven its existence!”
“Socrates never ascended to 11,000 metres!”
“That’s true – he found another way to kill himself! And he didn’t have a husband and a son!”

 

 

 

Already the tension is tangible, but as Claire rises perilously higher and higher in order to conduct her experiment, through intense cold and ever-thinning oxygen to 11,000 metres, it really racks up. And her mission fails: her instruments detect no aether at all. Rising further to 12,000 metres and the second and third trials still register nothing whatsoever and worse still – as Dulac notes in her logbook – her three-hour supply of oxygen has reached the point of no return!

Desperate to descend, that is exactly when the valves freeze shut. Seraphin’s mother struggles to release the hydrogen manually, but instead the balloon rises further to 12,900 metres… and BOOM! – there it is! – aether at last!

And everything around her explodes.

 

The following full-page spread is such a clever construction. Above we see the thin trail of a small object plummeting through star-lit, blue space towards the hazy surface of the Earth. Within three inset panels, which widen as they close in, the metal cylinder ignites as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. This expansion draws the eyes from the initial tiny white tail of light above to the final, full-page destination below which has been subtly fused with the global view, where the casket lies, cracked-open and fizzing with electrical energy, to reveal Claire Dulac’s logbook sitting precariously on a craggy cliff-edge above that self-same Bavarian Castle.

Now, who do you think recovered it, and what will they do with what lies within? Did Claire Dulac find time to scribble anything else?

 

 

Ah yes, the search is on as a potential source of energy for that elusive aether, the fifth Greek element which was once supposed to permeate the void of space so enabling the travel of light through a vacuum until Einstein finally suggested otherwise. But the Victorians still believed in it, just as they believed that Venus was a jungle-planet populated by dinosaurs and vast, pre-historic dragonflies because it was nearer the sun so hotter and younger than planet Earth. No really, they did! This wasn’t just Jules Verne speculative fiction.

This has all been so meticulously researched both geographically and historically (please note the date), and if you suspect Dulac’s light-bulb aether indicator to be a bit simplistic, you will be in for some far more serious science later on, about the expansion of hydrogen under different atmospheric pressures and the volume that would be required to lift certain weights. Or, I guess, different “masses” under these circumstances.

It is the supposed attributes of the planet Venus which Claire’s son Seraphin delights in expounding upon one year later at school when tasked with a presentation.

 

 

“Of course, despite the logical basis for these conclusions, there’s only one way to be absolutely sure… To go there! As soon as an aether-engine has been developed, we must send an expedition!”

Do you think he’s still obsessed much…? Well, he is. He wasn’t supposed to be research the planet Venus but the Roman goddess of love. Quite clearly: his class in question was Latin!

Even his father wants Seraphin to come to terms with his mother’s death by putting away models of her hot air balloon, but then they receive through the post a cryptic summons about her missing logbook, and an assignation to meet in Bavaria at Swan’s Rock.

But when Archibald and Seraphin try to board the train they are assaulted by other Germanic parties seeking to switch them to Berlin. Crucially, only Seraphin spies the sword-stick-wielding assassin at Lille Station, and that will have enormous implications for their future endeavours.

I’ll leave you to encounter the exquisite comedy moments, so well timed, one of which involves an out-of-control airship crashing Seraphin through the castle window only to get an eyeful of what he shouldn’t before being tugged blushing but face-savingly away. You’ll also like the royal architect who’s more of a set designer, determined to accommodate all manner of extravagances into Archibald’s Aethership, like a sitting room, royal suite, chapel and full orchestra pit!

 

 

 

But yes, this is quite, quite brilliant and beautiful with such attention to detail. Contrast the bright-skied Bavarian rustic tranquillity surrounding the mountain-top castle with its Prussian counterpart, the very real and monumentalist Berliner Stadtschloss, over whose dome drifts an oppressive and foreboding smoke while more industrial smog belches from tall chimneys behind the angry Black Eagle of the Prussian flag which is about to be resurrected for 1870’s Franco-Prussian War.

There the Prussian Prime Minister dwarfs his advisor Busch and casts his hand proprietarily over the globe:

“I don’t like war, Busch…
“I will wage it without pity or remorse, but I don’t like it.
“Do you know what aether would enable us to do? In a few short hours, we could travel to any city on the globe, and without ever having been detected by the enemy…
“Bury it under a deluge of bombs.”

I’m afraid his ambitions stretch even further than that.

SLH

Buy Castle In The Stars vol 1: The Space Race Of 1869 h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Royal City vol 1: Next Of Kin s/c (£8-99, Image) by Jeff Lemire…

“Sometimes I wonder if it was hard growing up in Royal City… just hard growing up.
“I mean, there’s just something different about this place.
“I swear you can feel it late at night, a weirdness creeping around the edges of things.
“Keeping you awake and making you feel even more alone.
“Or maybe that’s it. Maybe I am all alone.
“Maybe I’m the only one who thinks stupid shit like this all the time.”

Oh, I very much doubt that.

Following on from his recent barnstorming original graphic novel ROUGHNECK about a former ice hockey enforcer on a search for redemption, Jeff Lemire is remaining firmly grounded in the realm of straight fiction for this series set in the titular Royal City. Well, that’s if you don’t include the ghost of youngest brother Tommy haunting the remaining Pike family members since his death many years previously, that is… It’s a curious thing, though, how Tommy appears as a completely different age to each of them…

Patrick Pike, nominally our central character, is a successful writer, though he’s rapidly heading into the past tense in that respect, crippled as he is by writer’s block with a frantic agent demanding the whereabouts of his long overdue second novel, plus a failing marriage to a minor movie starlet to boot. The only one of the family to ever make it out of Royal City, Patrick’s back in town to visit their ailing father Peter in hospital following a severe stroke, which was at least partly brought on by his relentlessly browbeating nag of a wife Patti. Patrick’s siblings, hard-nosed developer Tara and drunken layabout Richie, make up the dysfunctional Pike family brood.

Over the course of this first volume I gained the distinct impression that the spectre of Tommy, as comforting a presence as he seems to be for all of the family members, is in fact the very thing that is holding them back from progressing with their current lives. Each are most definitely stuck in very different ways.

It’s most pronounced in the case of Richie, who sees Tommy at a contemporary post-passing age, another strange point in and of itself, and who talks to his late brother about the weekend booze benders and casino trips he want them to go on… future tense… Their mum sees Tommy as an older teenager, Patrick sees him as a young teen, Tara a slightly younger pre-adolescent boy and their father as a very young boy. Each of them converses with him as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

Though there is a very… perturbing… moment where Patrick does appear to momentarily glimpse all five incarnations, having been led by Tommy from the motel where he is staying to Tommy’s graveside. Were seeing the ghost of your dead brother not disturbing enough, surely seeing five different versions of him all stood together like they / he were posing for the oddest family snap ever would have you beginning to doubt your sanity?

Tommy in turn does have his own voice, he’s certainly no silent presence, providing us with some very insightful narrative commentary regarding his family and the nature of their individual attachments to him.

I read an interesting interview recently where Lemire was being quizzed as to the significance of him returning to contemporary fiction and whether, like his career-breakthrough ESSEX COUNTY, there were any autobiographical elements he’d recycled into the ROYAL CITY story. He said he liked to think of the character of Patrick as following his life story up to a point, that of achieving a degree of success with his first publication, then promptly, unlike himself, making every bad life choice he possibly could and having pretty much everything go wrong for him. He is the master of the melancholic, isn’t he, our Jeff?

The entirety of volume one is in many ways simply establishing the characters and setting their various, respective scenes of personal engagement, their familial points of connection but also their very distinct differences, of personality, opinion, pretty much everything. Lemire has commented that he is hoping this series could run from twenty to forty issues, and it’s easy to see how, because he’s given absolutely nothing away as yet, unless I’ve missed some vital clue, as to what is really going on. That is also the reason he chose to do ROYAL CITY as a series, rather than an original graphic novel like ROUGHNECK, to give the story and the characters chance to breathe and develop as he was writing.

Artistically, it’s back to full colour, exactly like the subdued yet surprisingly spectacular colour palette he employed in AFTER DEATH as opposed to the much more emotionally bleak primarily pale blues of ROUGHNECK, albeit dappled as they were with the very occasional splash of highly significant pigmentation.  Also, and it’s something I’ve probably noticed before but not commented on, Lemire’s art style really is perfect for making people look haggard and haunted, both metaphorically and phantasmagorically.  But are they really being haunted…? I genuinely have absolutely no idea. Volume two will, I suspect, bring some answers as to the true status of our deceased Pike, and I fear, considerably more conflict amongst the living ones.

JR

Buy Royal City vol 1: Next Of Kin s/c and read the Page 45 review here

‘Hammering the Anvil’

Quick introduction to avoid a whiplash of culture shock: the following review entitled ‘Hammering the Anvil’ was generously written for us by Dr. Matt Green, Associate Professor of Modern English Literature at Nottingham University (he retains its copyright, obviously). It is exceptional on every level. I have only illustrated it with images supplied by Matthew because to impose others seems to me slightly sacrilegious. Oh, okay, I needed another – Stephen

Nick Cave – Mercy On Me (Bookplate Edition) (£14-99, SelfMadeHero) by Reinhard Kleist.

I labour day and night, I behold the soft affections
Condense beneath my hammer into forms of cruelty
But still I labour in hope, tho’ still my tears flow down.
That he who will not defend Truth may be compelld to defend
A Lie: that he may be snared and caught and snared and taken
That Enthusiasm and Life may not cease: arise Spectre arise!

— William Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 9.

“Oh please, don’t sell me out”,
Said the man with the hammer,
Hammering the anvil
“I’ve been walking on the road of rocks,
And I keep on hammering,
Keep on hammering,
Keep on hammering,
Hammering the anvil.”

Shovelling the ashes
Chiseling the surface
Firing the furnace
Hammering the anvil.
Keep it on, keep it on, keep it on!
Hammering the anvil.

— The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, ‘Hammer Song’

Those listeners old and brave enough to have attended a bona fide Birthday Party gig might have been surprised when, in a 1996 Radio 3 Religious Services lecture, Nick Cave described the band’s violent interventions in the post-punk landscape by comparing himself to William Blake. But not, perhaps, if they were familiar with Blake’s darker side.

It is to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Cave turns: “to loosely paraphrase William Blake: I myself did nothing; I just pointed a damning finger and let the Holy Spirit do the rest”. Blake’s Marriage, a verbal and visual rebellion against economic and intellectual oppression, certainly enjoyed considerable currency in Cave’s own counter-cultural inheritance: Jim Morrison and W.H. Auden, to name but two, both seized upon that text’s celebration of sexual energy and imagination. But if The Marriage identifies the creative artist as a conduit for divine vision and voice, it is in prophecies such as Jerusalem where Blake explores the darker implications of linking the psycho-sexual outpourings of the artist to the creative destruction of biblical prophecy. Los — whose name is an anagram of ‘Sol’ — is for Blake the archetype of the fallen poet: a blacksmith charged with redeeming a fallen world whose guilt he shares. Los with his phallic hammer and fiery workshop becomes a metaphor for the artist who must first subdue his demons before seeking to liberate the world.

“EXPRESS YOURSELF!!! / EXPRESS YOURSELF!!!” Reinhard Kleist’s post-pubescent Cave screams early in this visionary biography, beating a mic stand against the skulls of his anointed “DONK / DONK / DONK”. This first chapter takes its title from ‘The Hammer Song’, released on The Good Son (1990) and, like the other four chapters — ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, ‘And the Ass Saw the Angel’, ‘The Mercy Seat’ and ‘Higgs Boson blues’ — deploys the fictional world of its namesake as a narrative frame for Kleist’s astute retelling of iconic moments from Cave’s career. Those familiar with Ian Johnston’s Bad Seed (1996) and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 20,000 Days on Earth (2014) will already be acquainted with the events depicted, while those coming at this material for the first time would do well to equip themselves for the journey by packing these works along with Cave’s extensive musical and literary back-catalogue. A word of warning: you will need a strong back.

Kleist’s choice of ‘The Hammer Song’ for chapter one unfolds into the sort of doubling effect that Blake associates with the two-fold vision of spiritual awakening. You see, Cave’s oeuvre includes not one, but two Hammer Songs. The Good Son version is narrated by a young man who flees his paternal homestead under the cover of darkness, then from the murderous citizens of a nameless city and finally arrives in a river where he drowns amidst visions of an angel who carries handfuls of snakes. Here the hammer is a gavel beating out the shape of the speaker’s doom. But four years earlier, Cave’s audience was treated to a very different ‘Hammer Song’ on Kicking Against the Pricks (1986). Kicking is an album of cover songs, many of which stood at loggerheads with Cave’s public persona and it tells us something about the paradoxical nature of covering  — these are covers that uncover Cave’s own sources— as well as the nature of creative reception. Whereas Harvey’s song establishes a metaphorical link between the songwriter and the blacksmith, the Bad Seed’s covers evoke the image of a balladeer looking back on his — or her — forefathers with an admixture of self-consciousness and rage. The artist seeks to cover the dead, to show them due respect but also to keep them buried, a task bound to failure because the poet in this day and age is not only a thief but a grave-robber.

Kleist’s rendition of Cave’s life and works is a cover in this sense. His Cave is the self-fashioned rock god that we see tramping through 20,000 Days, the man-god fashioned from the dreams of a boy who watches his father transformed by the recitations of Nabokov and Shakespeare. His energetic line whirls us from Cave’s boyhood memories all the way up to Push the Sky Away (2013). On the few occasions where Kleist’s visuals do allow the eye to pause — on a cob-webbed piano or a waiting electric chair — we are offered nothing less than the uncanny respite at the heart of a biblical whirlwind. If Kleist takes from Forsyth and Pollard a certain mythologising approach to biography and if certain panels reproduce iconic scenes from their film (note how the image of Cave at work on ‘Higgs Boson’ draws on the still used for the movie poster), his work foregrounds the extent to which their use of fiction to convey truth effectively replicates Cave’s own artistic practice as he describes it in the final scene of 20,000 Days:      

“What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt the monster to the surface. To create a space where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us.

“This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect, this is where all love and tears and joy exist.  

“This is the place. This is where we live.”

Kleist builds upon the mythologising aspect of Cave’s self-presentations, developing the motif of Cave as a malign demiurge out of Cave’s own reflections concerning his relationship to the beings he creates: “And the more I write,” he tells us early in 20,000 Days, “the more detailed and elaborate the world becomes and all the characters that live and die or just fade away, they’re just crooked versions of myself”. One suspects that there might be something a little masochistic in the portrait of divine madness Kleist paints, though it manifests itself in homicidal compulsion. “For the record, I never killed Elisa Day”, Cave declares in the resounding endorsement of Mercy on Me featured on the back cover; but, this says nothing of the other bodies Kleist lays at his feet: the nameless speakers in ‘The Hammer Song’ and ‘The Mercy Seat’, as well as Euchrid Eucrow and Elisa Day.

The front cover, meanwhile, gets the carnival up and running, announcing Kleist’s willingness to launch himself into the danse macabre of Cave-world. The cover image is itself an adaptation of Cave’s public persona, another example of a fictional mask that lays bare the heart of its artificer: Kleist so loves his subject that he cannot help disfiguring him with his own brand of sacralising violence. The image depicts Cave dressed in the dark suit and white shirt characteristic of his stage performances, lurching sightlessly toward the reader. His absent eyes bind him to a romantic trope associating blindness with inner vision that stretches back to Oedipus, Tiresias and Milton, the poet who first deployed the phrase “red right hand” as a satanic metonym for Christ.

While this sense of artistic guilt is one part of Cave’s post-Romantic inheritance, so too is the hope that the material world can be transformed by the artist’s imagination into something that, if not perfect, is at least better. And this overlap between the fictional and the real is an effect well-suited to the comics medium, whose practitioners must delineate their worlds both visually and verbally. The comics artist who strives to depict historical truths in a literal manner, must forever take pains to separate the kernels of the real from the layers of cultural chaff that grow up around them. For those of a more literary bent, however, history’s tendency to bleed into story demonstrates the dialogic relationship between the worlds inside a book’s covers and those beyond them.

Visually — and also in its obsession with a present haunted by the past and vice versa — Mercy on Me bears an affinity to Warren Ellis and Marek Oleksicki’s Frankenstein’s Womb (2009) and to Jeff Lemire’s Essex County (2009). In its rumination on the performative dimension of art, however, as well as in its warren of meta-textual tunnels, Kleist’s Gothic wonderland closely recalls Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland. The first Cave biography in comics, a collaboration between Talbot and Cave that featured in Spin magazine’s, ‘Real Life Rock Tales’ (January 2003), was something of a gothic comedy-romance, complete with cake, a corpse dressed as a Christmas tree and teenage love by the river’s edge. Kleist’s own narrative, with its temporal disjunctions, doppelgängers and spiritual visitations, wears its gothic aesthetics with a straight face, more or less. But there is a dark — and dare I say cheeky — humour lurking in the interstice between Kleist’s work and its broader contexts; see, for example, the depiction of Cave in the grip of addiction coming upon a sheet of paper in his typewriter filled by the incessant repetition of a sentence straight out of the Stanley Hotel: “All work and no play makes Nick a dull boy”.

The appearance of Margaret Thatcher in the story world of ‘Jangling Jack’, gig posters and a Berlin wall decorated with graffiti, together with allusions to Franz Kafka and a shipwreck motif reminiscent of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, draw the reader into an imaginative engagement with wider political and cultural contexts. Kleist here asserts implicitly the bardic power and curse laid down for those contemporary artists bold enough to lay their necks on the line. For first and foremost, Kleist reminds us, these worlds he inks into existence were sung. We see this in the way he interweaves scenes from the recording studio and the stage into the unfolding of the song-stories and legends told by and about Cave; we see it too in the rhythmic tapping of Cave on his typewriter, forty-eight tiny hammers beating Euchrid Eucrow and all others of his kind into existence: “Tac / Tac / Tac”.

And we see it in the velocity of Kleist’s own lines, no more so than when their razor-sharp edges give way to smudges and smears. Indeed, there are pages without dialogue or sound effects where the scrape of pen and the swish of brush harmonise with the sound of imaginary whirlpools, pelting rain and the screams of a rock god dancing with a Charybdis. Spend too much time looking at any one panel and you may get sucked into a vortex that is also a rabbit hole, in which characters dream their creators and no one is in Kansas anymore.

Kleist’s work, like Cave’s, transforms and transports us, removing us to a world in which creativity itself is as addictive and dangerous as heroine: observe the panels in which Cave injects ink into the obsidian network of his veins and arboresces over his Seiko Silverette, hands morphing into roots that draw sustenance from the leaves of typescript strewn across the floor of his Berlin bedroom.

 

The repeated emphasis on the materiality, the fecundity, of novels, of comics, of music and of speech draws us back to the truth that words and pictures are things that have a reciprocal relationship with the world into which they are spawned.

Kleist does well to direct our gaze toward the significant others — the lovers, friends and bandmates who collaborate in Cave’s visionary madness. And that adorns the back cover, which depicts Cave grasping one outstretched palm in a field of upraised hands, evokes something of the tactility with which his audience receives him in concert.

Nevertheless, the final page of Kleist’s narrative presents Cave alone, retreating from the stage, while the endpaper treats us to a gorgeous and atmospheric portrait of Cave traversing an empty street in the snow. These images humanise Cave — for who hasn’t dabbled in the iconography of the lone prophet crying in the wilderness: “I alone, even I”. And yet, what these portraits mask is the way that the universalising aspect of Cave’s work — that bit of it that bites into the heart-flesh of his fans — depends on his attempts to both lose and find himself in the midst of some larger organism: a band, an audience.

The stories of the boy racing toward the thunder of an oncoming locomotive or dancing alone behind a locked door — stories Cave himself has a predilection for recounting — give only part of the picture. What we don’t see in such portraits is the singer who doesn’t simply clasp the hands of a chosen one, but dives into the crowd. What the figure of the blind prophet precludes is the moment of mutual recognition when you are standing in the front row and your eyes meet his, when you see Cave seeing you. Elsewhere in the text, Kleist shows us just enough of the collaborative dimension of Cave’s world-building to suggest that when our demiurge walks offstage alone, this is but one stroke of the pendulum.

The Christian concept of mercy is orientated around the startling idea that God might willingly trade places with human beings — Christ suffers and dies so that we have a shot at immortality. Deification is a collaborative and consensual process; it depends on communion. Kleist has given us a beautiful grotesquery of poetic truths. This is a delightful book that richly complements existing iterations of the Cave mythos. But if you actually want to feel the beat of the hammer in your blood, to partake in the apocalyptic act of god-making that Kleist delineates so masterfully, well, that will require some concert-going.

Ecce homo.

Dr. Matt Green
Associate Professor of Modern English Literature,
Nottingham University

Buy Nick Cave – Mercy On Me (Bookplate Edition) and read the Page 45 review here

Hadrian’s Wall (£17-99, Image) by Kyle Higgins, Alec Siegel & Rod Reis…

“Edward Madigan is dead, Simon.”
“What happened?”
“There was an accident. He was on an E.V.A. when his space suit… vented.”
“Jesus…”
“The company needs to make sure they have a full understanding of events. With all this unrest between Earth and the colony on Theta… they’re being overly cautious. Between you and me, it’s a formality. A rubber stamp job.”
“Marshall…”
“But it pays one hundred thousand.”
“You gotta find another contractor.”
“Look, I know there are… issues. But like I said… it’s a rubber stamper. We head out, you do a once-over, sign off on how he died…”
“He shot me four times and married my ex-wife. I don’t give a shit why his suit vented.”
“I’m giving you a chance to make a hundred grand off it. Schadenfreude is underrated, Simon. Think about it.”

What Marshall has neglected to mention is that Simon’s ex-wife, Annabelle, is also on the space ship that Simon will shortly be heading for to ‘investigate’ Edward’s death. Both Simon and Edward used to be cops, back in Seattle, in fact Edward was Simon’s boss… Well, at least until he started banging his wife, then he kindly transferred him to another division… In retrospect, though, breaking into their house to look for the engagement ring that used to belong to his mother – which Annabelle wouldn’t give back out of pure spite – wasn’t the smartest thing to do. That’s the sort of behaviour that gives someone the excuse they’ve just been waiting for to shoot you four times. Even if that sort of excessive response can get you pensioned off the force to hush it all quiet…

It is, of course, nowhere near as simple as that, as Simon will find when he joins up with the survey ship Hadrian’s Wall and its crew way out in deep space. For a start, the rapidly heating up new Cold War between Earth and its biggest colony, Theta, has got everyone twitchy, and it’s abundantly clearly to Simon that everyone on board seems to be hiding something from him. If he had any sense he’d do his rubber stamp duty, collect his 100K and head back to Earth to keep popping his painkillers, but the cop in him can’t help but want to get to the bottom of what really happened, not least because he suspects Annabelle is responsible for Edward’s death.

It is, of course, nowhere near as simple as that!

Excellent vacuum-packed piece of police procedural work all wrapped up in lovely shiny science fiction foil. And no, I’m not referring to a particularly bizarre variant cover, thank goodness. Kyle Higgins and Alec Siegel have crafted a very tense whodunit here, which even when the culprit has been finally revealed still has secrets galore to give up in rather painful fashion. Simon, grappling with his own not inconsiderable demons from the onset – as are laid excruciatingly bare for us to empathise with, including an extreme dependency on the pain killers he took to after getting shot – rapidly finds his psychological problems accelerating to escape velocity as parties unknown take it upon themselves to flush his stash into space.

 

Once Edward, clad in his battered space suit, starts making hallucinatory appearances, pro-offering advice like Hopkirk, of Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), well, it all starts to make the process of deductive reasoning rather more difficult. Wittering ghosts are somewhat of a distraction whilst trying to crack a case, indeed just avoid cracking up, I would imagine. Still, he’s nothing but persistent our Edward, shame he didn’t try so hard on his marriage years previously… something Annabelle is only too happy to point out to him, repeatedly. You’d have thought being in the frame for her husband’s murder with her ex-husband having the power to send her down might make her tongue somewhat less acerbic, but no. Maybe he wasn’t entirely to blame…

Rod Reis simply excels on art duty. Lovely sharp linework and some great little touches are his trademark. His facial expressions are a real strong point too. He manages to make Annabella look like she has the veritable zero Kelvin perma-frost of a demeanour throughout, particularly where Edward is concerned.

This trio of Higgins, Siegel and Reis has worked together before to excellent effect on the sadly short-lived but rather splendid two book C.O.W.L. non-superhero superhero crime series, also on Image. As Stephen commented in his review of the first volume of that series, there’s a sublime touch of Bill Sienkiewicz in Reis’ work. Complete in one volume, this will chill you right to the end…

JR

Buy Hadrian’s Wall and read the Page 45 review here

The Beautiful Death #1 (£4-99, Titan) by Mathieu Bablet.

Oh, this is ever so French!

It’s not so much the poor lone man with the haunted eyes staring out over the lifeless concrete city, weeping inconsolably. For himself, I suspect.

I can’t say that I blame him. It’s been four years or so of unbroken solitary… what’s the opposite of confinement? Sometimes four small walls must seem a mercy.

It’s all there before him, stretching endlessly, emptily, dirtily and a bit broken.

What else is there to do other than rock on a chair, mind-numb, or roam the echoing avenues, passing abandoned communal play areas, unattended gardens, crashed cars and lank electricity lines?

It’s as desolate and derelict as an empty outdoor municipal swimming pool – with some of the same, lame, tiny mosaic tiles.

See tiny tiles on stairwell he’s walking down – swimming pool, no? – Stephen

There are small trails of encroaching vegetation in the cracked concrete. I bet the buddleias got there first – they’re the worst.

Eventually he finds himself back at his equally unpopulated apartment with its lo-tech radio & car battery attached, calling out to anyone else who isn’t there. No reply, obviously.

It wasn’t zombies, by the way. It was the insects.

“I just can’t get rid of it. That taste of ash in my mouth.
“It reminds me… Reminds me of those Wednesday afternoons.
“My mother would take me over to Mrs. Jones for her madeleines. She was terrifying. So were the madeleines.”

Okay, so that’s pretty French.

“Burnt to ash. Just like any love for my dad still left in my mother’s heart.”

Bit of a downer!

“Sadly, for the culinary world, the gentle Mrs. Jones perished in a tragic mishap at the zoo, determined to save a poor adventurous child from the hands of a rutting orang-utan.”

No, what’s so French about this are the three bickering idiots who “supersede” him.

I don’t want to spoil the moment for you, but even his exit is French. Too funny!

There’s Jeremiah, the shouty one with spiky blonde hair like some escapee from NARUTO; stern leader Wayne who has set rules and demands discipline except from Soham who doesn’t seem to give a shit about anyone or anything anymore. Soham seems to have lost all sense of humanity or connection to it. Although he still looks both ways before crossing a road, even though there hasn’t been any traffic for years.

 

They scour the shops and loot every can that they can. Cans are all that’s left. And even they have their sell-by dates.

“Four years… according to this can that’s all we have left.”
“Say what?”
“We never talk about it, but no matter how you cut it, the days on these cans are our expiration date too.”

There appear to be no viable crops and no edible animals. Although insects are edible, aren’t they? There are an awful lot of those.

It’s very much two against one: they almost abandon Jeremiah at one point.

It’s a very quiet comic. Even the “incident” is more of a situation, simply presented to us without any preceding narrative or the most obvious dramatic action that would have got us all going.

The rescue goes unacknowledged. Instead they stand there in silence, in the needle-sharp rain under coloured umbrellas – very French.

Other roof-top, table-top umbrellas blow poetically away in the squall.

That’s some seriously lovely rain, that is.

SLH

Buy The Beautiful Death #1 and read the Page 45 review here

The Corbyn Comic Book (£4-99, SelfMadeHero) by various including Hanna Berry, Stephen Collins, Steven Appleby, Dix, Steve Bell, Karrie Fransman, Kate Evans, Paul Rainey, more.

That’s a pretty impressive line-up and it’s only scratching the surface. A quick glance down the credits shows 40-odd contributors with one to three pages each.

Anyway, I’ve been on holiday this week, so for once I’ll let the publisher speak before adding a few choice words myself because this was very well written:

“Pollsters called it a foregone conclusion. Columnists said Theresa May’s snap general election wouldn’t just return her a thumping majority in the House of Commons it would plunge the Opposition into existential crisis. For Labour MPs, concerns about job security in an age of zero-hours contracts suddenly felt uncomfortably close to home.

“And then something happened. Momentum got to work. Grime4Corbyn gathered steam. Clicktivists became door-knocking, flag-waving activists. Jezza talked jam on the One Show and opened for the Libertines at Prenton Park. All this while Theresa turned into the Maybot and the Conservatives released a manifesto that looked bad for people and even worse for animals.

“Islington-dwelling socialist, bike-riding pacifist, green-fingered threat to the status quo: this revolutionary anthology captures the qualities and quirks of the Daily Mail’s worst nightmare.”

The Guardian wrote:

“In one incarnation, he is Corbyn the Barbarian, facing off against the Maydusa. In another, Corbynman leaves his ‘mild mannered allotment of solitude’ to take on the ‘inter-dimensional invasion fleet of Daily Mail death drones blasting everything with their Tory food bank rays’ with a rallying battle cry of ‘jam on!’. Just in time for the Labour party conference, an unlikely superhero is preparing to take his place alongside the likes of Spider-Man and Wonder Woman: Jeremy Corbyn.”

SelfMadeHero’s Sam wrote:

“Just back from the Labour Conference, where many people took the comic too seriously (the cult of Corbyn! Infantalisation! Nonsense!) but many more got the joke.”

Sam’s such a lovely!

You’re probably no longer reading this so I’m going to feel free to add my two cents’ worth. Not about Theresa Dismay who’s transparently such a “liar, liar, liar”, but about Corbyn who can be equally disingenuous.

Oh, I’m a huge Corbyn fan. Proudly Socialist, me, and Jezza genuinely cares. He has a heart of gold, the lacerating quick wit of a stand-up comedian and the oratory of an angel when he’s not being an unnecessarily old grumpy-goat. I’d happily vote for every one of his policies… except Brexit.

See, the thing is, Corbyn was always in favour of Brexit, so he “somehow” “inconveniently” lost his voice during the Brexit campaign (mislaid down the back of the sofa where he knew he could find it immediately during the General Election campaign) and has since been all too happy to let this most horrifically expensive, economically disastrous, culturally catastrophic and completely counter-productive grudge go unchecked because dear Wedgie Benn (he is adored!) once wanted to leave Europe too (in this he was flawed!).

And that’s all this is for the Britons who bought into Brexit: a decades-old grudge against Europe based on Daily Mail lies that straight bananas would be mandatory (they never were, were they?) and the Continent wanted to mess about with our cheese or something.

So, you know, that’s what I mean by disingenuous.

I’d quite like an Opposition, please.

Still, always end on a high note and if you think renationalising Fractured Rail is going to be expensive (you cannot have a transport or environmental policy without a nationalised British Rail) then have you even seen the Brexit bills so far? And Europe’s proposed costs for quitting…?

Just think of all the money we could have poured into the NHS hahahahahahaha! *sobs*

Hey, this comic is one long review of Jeremy Corbyn, so I’m only joining in.

[Strips shown by Richard Dearing, Martin Rowson, Louis Netter & Olly Gruner in that order. Brexit Chart not included in comic – ed.]

SLH

Buy The Corbyn Comic Book and read the Page 45 review here

Josephine (£11-99, SLG Publishing) by Kevin Sacco.

No interior art online!

None whatsoever at the time of typing.

This is a visual medium and this is a silent comic.

It’s quite a beautiful silent comic too, told in grey tone and clean, graceful, pencils which don’t seek to hide their initial sketch marks.

But there is no interior art online whatsoever. Brilliant.

Accordingly I will be brief.

Revisiting a modernised New York Upper West Side, a man of a certain age reminisces about his childhood in the 1950s or ‘60s. If his father at first seems to be an affable, respectable and much loved if always-absent suited and booted businessman, his mother is a complete bitch and bully. When she’s not sloshing vodka down her grimacing gullet, she’s out shopping in the most expensive department stores while the family’s black, live-in housemaid looks after the young, bespectacled tyke, lavishing him with love and furnishing him with pocket money from her own meagre wages. She even buys him comics, which his mother delights in tearing to pieces right in front of him. Oh there is glee in her eyes, and a truly wicked smile.

The boy’s nanny takes him to visit her friends and relatives, one of whom is an army veteran. They are all smashing and provide more nurture for the lad in one afternoon than his parents combined over the first ten years of his life.

I’d go on, but I cannot see the point. I’m not going to sell any copies online with no art to show you, am I?

For from the first but final warning: publishers, if there is no interior art online, I won’t even bother with a few cursory paragraphs like this. It should not be up to me to write to you.

PS The father proves himself to be a complete monster too.

SLH

Buy Josephine and read the Page 45 review here

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

New reviews to follow, but if they’re new formats of previous books, reviews may already be up; others will retain their Diamond previews information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.

Archangel h/c (£18-99, Other A-Z) by William Gibson & Butch Guice

Dalston Monsterzz h/c (£14-99, Nobrow) by Dilraj Mann

Fred The Clown: The Iron Duchess (£17-99, Fantagraphics) by Roger Langridge

Katzine: The Guatemala Issue (£5-50, self-published) by Katriona Chapman

M.F.K. h/c (£16-99, Insight Comics) by Nilah Magruder

Morton: A Cross-Country Rail Journey (£17-99, Conundrum Press) by David Collier

Outcast vol 5: The New Path s/c (£14-99, Image) by Robert Kirkman & Paul Azaceta

Samaris s/c (£17-99, IDW) by Benoit Peeters & Francois Schuiten

Screwed (£5-99, Adhouse Books) by Konstantin Steshenko

The Visitor: How And Why He Stayed (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson & Paul Grist

Walking Dead: Here’s Negan! (£17-99, Image) by Robert Kirkman & Charlie Adlard

We Found A Hat s/c (£6-99, Walker Books) by Jon Klassen

Batman: Detective Comics vol 3: League Of Shadows s/c (Rebirth) (£17-99, DC) by James Tynion IV & Marcio Takara, various

Poison Ivy: Cycle Of Life And Death s/c (£14-99, DC) by Amy Chu & various

Doctor Strange vol 4: Mr. Misery (UK Edition) s/c (£13-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron, Kathryn Immonen, Robbie Thompson & Frazer Irving, Chris Bachalo, Kevin Nowlan, Leonardo Romero, Jonathan Marks Barravecchia

Thor vol 1: The Goddess Of Thunder s/c (£17-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Russell Dauterman, Jorge Molina

Thor vol 2: Who Holds The Hammer? s/c (£16-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Russell Dauterman