Archive for June, 2018

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews June 2018 week four

Wednesday, June 27th, 2018

Includes seven Young Adult / Young Reader graphic beauties, one by Jillian Tamaki, another by the aptly named Jessica Love!

Cloud Hotel (£17-99, Top Shelf) by Julian Hanshaw…

“Happy place. Happy place. Happy place. Happy place.”
“Oh no. Not here. Please.”

Nope, not me having to calm down Stephen after another month of grinding through the PREVIEWS order form, but, poor young Remco, an unwilling repeat patron of the peculiar titular establishment which is most assuredly not a destination that is ever going to make a list of top tourist destinations, despite every room having a spectacular view.

No, after being apparently abducted by a UFO on the 1st March 1981 and promptly returned back to terra firma safely, if not entirely intact, Remco’s having a very specific issue. For he keeps finding himself zoning out and seemingly waking up back in the cloud hotel, a strange morphing building floating gently on the surface of the cumulus, with the vertical stabilisers of passing aeroplanes poking through, and inhabited by other kids who have also been taken.

 

 

At least to start with… For as time passes, one by one the residents answer a phone call from the old-style pay phone in a horrifically retro wallpapered room, receiving their summons to be called through the similarly papered double doors, never to be seen again, until only Remco and the sunglasses-wearing Emma remain. They are fabulous sunglasses actually, I must add, with a magic all of their own that immediately transported me back in time myself to 1982 and a certain Tizer advert, which, I’m quite sure more than a few others of you of a certain age will still have burnt into the back of the brains somewhere. You can keep your Fanta and your Irn Bru, Tizer was always the top of the t-shirt staining pops for me.

 

 

Right, I appear to have digressed… So, there are two burning questions, one each for Emma and Remco. Remco, who having seen people willingly perambulate through those disorientatingly decorated doors and promptly disappear, steadfastedly refuses to answer the phone when the bell tolls for him. That might be why he is the only person who dissipates back to Earth, but also possibly why he keeps re-materialising in the hotel. Walking through that exit might solve his conundrum for him, but he’s not prepared to take the risk that he might end up… somewhere else. Emma, on the other hand, is utterly baffled as to why the phone never rings for her at all… Clearly there is something different about them both, but what?! What they are finding it increasingly hard to ignore, however, is that the hotel is gradually changing and becoming ever more distorted and unstable…

 

 

Back on the ground meanwhile, the one person who is convinced that Remco hasn’t gone a bit doolalley, and believes him completely about the aliens and the cloud hotel, is his Granddad, but sadly he’s about to take a certain, somewhat final, journey of his own… Not that he’s remotely sad about it at all, no. Not least because he has his own theories about Remco’s little excursions…

 

 

Ahhh… the auteur behind one of my favourite graphic novels of all time, TIM GINGER, returns with another unfathomable and perplexing work to beguile us! Yes, Julian Hanshaw has once again produced a story that takes us in entirely unexpected and unsignposted directions which is precisely what great writers do. Inspired by an encounter of his own as a young lad with a UFO on the 26th October 1980 near the implausible named market town of Tring in leafy Hertfordshire (I always knew there was something about the Chiltern Hills…) this tale of blurred states of consciousness vibrating between imagination and reality will make you want to believe!

The fact that Remco during his initial… encounter… manages to bring back a shred of the offending wallpaper only serves to deepen the mystery about precisely where it is that he keeps going. That disconcerting of wallpaper, by the way, is lovingly recreated under the front and rear French flaps for your pleasure… I love to see that, not a single bit of space wasted in transporting the reader somewhere else entirely too!

 

 

As before, Julian’s meticulous attention to detail with his unique style of fine-lined art, combined with the muted yet almost luminous colour palette, plus some ingenious panel and page compositional devices thrown in for good measure make this a strong contender for my top book of the year.

JR

Buy Cloud Hotel and read the Page 45 review here

They Say Blue h/c (£12-99, Abrams) by Jillian Tamaki.

Truly, a book of wonders and of wonderment!

Crows on the cover, seagulls underneath, and throughout the movement, energy and enthusiasm is phenomenal.

Birds whirl in the wind, a field of golden grass billows in waves, and a young girl swirls as she casts off her coat and breathes in the unfettered freedom before wriggling out of her thick, woollen sweater, then bouncing off the page.

That spread reminded me of young Wendy’s jigging in the Tamaki cousins’ bilberry blue THIS ONE SUMMER.

There is swimming and splashing and a sea breeze blowing through her hair, and the bright blue sky swoops up above as far as the eyes can see from a sandy beach promontory, while the choppy, white-horse ocean ripples all around.

 

 

Yellows and reds ripple too, emanating from the infant like a Japanese Zen garden raked in the sand, then rugby, soccer and tennis balls are tossed between friends in the bustling primary school playground.

 

 

Even at rest there is movement in the lines that cocoon the girl just like the blanket in her sleep, or the brushing of hair in the morning.

And oh, how these colours do glow!

 

 

Thick, wet washes of yellow bleed into complementary reds to form orange; blue into red to form purple. Or there’s that early morning contrast in the contact between cool, night-time blue in the bedroom giving way to a burst of yolk-yellow sunrise as “the black crows bob and chatter in the field outside”. Spring is all avocado green and bark brown on crisp white paper during an imagined, celebratory, arborescent page!

 

 

From the creator of adults-orientated BOUNDLESS collection and the co-creator of THIS ONE SUMMER graphic novel, (both of which we made Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month), a young girl wonders at the bounty of life all around and within her, embraces nature and marvels at the majesty of it all.

Seasons cycle and colour is questioned.

“They say blue is the colour of the sky.
“Which is true today!
“They say the sea is blue, too.
“It certainly looks like it from here.
“But when I hold the water in my hands, it’s as clear as glass.
“I toss it up in the air to make diamonds.”

 

 

Wow.

SLH

Buy They Say Blue h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Julian Is A Mermaid h/c (£11-99, Walker Books) by Jessica Love.

Well, this brought a tear to Neil Gaiman’s eye.

Even my own cold, black heart has been warmed thoroughly through, and has burst into every colour of the rainbow.

It’s a very quiet book in which actions speak louder than words.

“This is a boy named Julian. And this is his Nana.
“And those are some mermaids.
“Julian LOVES mermaids.”

Are they mermaids? Look a little closer.

By this very first page I’d already fallen in love, particularly with Nana, firstly because of her body form which fills her voluminous clothes and – along with her hooded eyes and slightly sagging jowls – suggests a weight as well as wealth of experience; also on account of her silent, attentive gaze which is far from cloying but instead watchful and wise.

 

 

But you’re not at all sure what Nana is thinking.

One suspects that she is given to keeping her own counsel.

Julian drifts into an aqueous reverie in which he sinks slowly into water, jettisoning his clothes to swim up and unconstrained with a wave of schooling sea life, thrilling in their vibrant colours and exhilarating diversity! I’m no marine biologist, but I’m pretty sure that only the same species of fish school together in such a coordinated fashion. Here, however, swim are all manner of rays, jellyfish, a rich red and orange octopus then a deep blue eel whose tail suggests that Julian might be a mermaid too.

 

 

Indeed, he tells Nana precisely that, as they walk from the train to Nana’s front door.

“Nana, did you see the mermaids?”
“I saw them, honey.”
“Nana, I am also a mermaid.”

He looks up at his Nana, gingerly, unsure what to expect.

Her eyes look deep into his.

“I’m going to take a bath,” she says when inside. “You be good.”

Will Julian be good…?

 

 

I love the choice of a smooth but subtly pulp-textured cardboard brown as the book’s paper base on which the paint rests and glows, so that the story is permeated with warmth and outright heat in the noon-day streets where an old man is understandably sedentary while a trio of giggling girls plays in the spray of a water hydrant. It’s especially effective for the intricately laced edges of the diaphanous cream curtains which at first billow in the breeze then form a trail like a tail.

 

 

Because no, Julian isn’t going to be good, exactly, and I’m not sure at all what Nana is going to make of her potted fern being cropped, her mirrored dresser’s tulips being redeployed, her lipstick being borrowed and her curtain taken down then repurposed!

 

 

Actually, her initial reaction is quite the picture of quietly controlled, cheek-flushed, scowling indignation!

Without a word, she walks off to dress, leaving Julian to silently contemplate his ceremonial self in the mirror. Still, he does look radiant.

 

 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand that’s where I’ll leave you.

I’ll also leave you with the promise that the last dozen pages are going to bring big, beaming smiles to your beautiful faces because you are all inclusive wonders with love in your hearts!

As is our Nana, for she has been listening.

SLH

Buy Julian Is A Mermaid h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Day The Crayons Quit s/c (£7-99, Harper Collins) by Drew Daywalt & Oliver Jeffers.

In which each of young Duncan’s differently coloured wax crayons takes its turn to petition him for leniency, variety, precedence, fulfilment or, in one instance, a new set of clothes!

You’ll see: a little bit of lateral thinking goes a long way.

Unequivocally excellent, I see exactly how this must make for much merry bedtime discussion after each page, then probably an impatient desire to draw more immediately!

So it’s probably best read to your young ones during daylight instead, just before you want them to entertain themselves for three hours. Oh yes, parental strategy there from someone who doesn’t have a paternal bone in his body. Okay, not remotely true, but from someone who’s never had a kid of his own. I’ll be offering you unsolicited advice on your love life, next!

Let’s return to the picture book’s picket-line protest:

 

 

Some of the crayons crave more work, some would prefer far less: one has been rubbed right down to a nub.  Beige Crayon would very much like to be called by its proper name of which it is proud (not “light brown” or “dark tan”, thank you very much indeed) while another upstart urges Duncan to calm down and be much tidier between the lines or IT WILL COMPLETELY LOSE IT.

Grey Crayon has an issue with being used for all the big beasts like elephants and rhinos and hippos and humpback whales, and suggests more dainty deployment. Green Crayon, on the other hand, is very satisfied indeed:

“Dear Duncan,

“As Green Crayon, I am writing for two reasons. One is to say that I like my work – loads of crocodiles, trees, dinosaurs and frogs.”

Yes, that does sound like fun! Go, Green!

“I have no problems and wish to congratulate you on a very successful “colouring things green” career so far.”

 

 

That’s very kind. So what’s the second reason?

“The second reason I write is for my friends, Yellow Crayon and Orange Crayon, who are no longer speaking to each other. Both crayons feel THEY should be the colour of the sun. Please settle this soon because they’re driving the rest of us CRAZY!”

Guess which two will be writing in next? That argument needs settling, Solomon!

Peach’s predicament is something else entirely, and if as a child you have never insensitively violated a crayon’s personal modesty in this particular way, then I would be very surprised indeed. Clue: it starts when you’ve used that colour so often that the tip of the wax is in danger of disappearing beneath its paper-band wrapper. So you strip a little off the top at first, but before you know it you have unravelled it all (then probably taken a bite).

 

 

Lastly, however, poor Pink Crayon is feeling that Duncan has perhaps fallen prey to the learned behaviour of gender stereotyping because, unlike his sister, not once has Duncan even used him during the past calendar year. Dinosaurs can be pink, he submits, as can monsters and cowboys. He’s quite right, of course: down with the dogma of literal depiction, and up with the anarchy of self-expression!

 

 

Utterly ingenious, this is sure to spark maximum creativity.

I’d like to congratulate each of the Crayons on their very neat handwriting, with few crossings-out.

Have a gold star, each!

SLH

Buy The Day The Crayons Quit s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Space Boy vol 1 s/c (£9-99, Dark Horse) by Stephen McCranie.

Amy and Jemmah are teenage best friends who’ve grown up together on a mining colony way out in deep space. They’ve developed special secret signals to confirm they’ll be best friends forever! But when Amy’s dad loses his job, the family are forced to board a spaceship back to Earth to begin a new life. Worse still is this killer catch: they’ll all need to spend 30 years frozen in cryogenic suspension so that when Amy steps out, Jemmah will have grown up without her.

“All I can think about is how, when I arrive on Earth, Jemmah will be thirty years older than me.”

Water wells up in her eye.

And then she is frozen.

When she wakes up, her arms feel heavy because of the increased gravity on Earth compared to the asteroid. Then she discovers something equally unexpected.

“I wipe my eye and a jewel falls out – a cold, sparkling diamond.
“No. Not a diamond. A tear.
“A tear that’s been frozen for thirty years. It melts in my hand.”

Ouch.

 

 

Throughout the book there is exactly that level of attention to detail – it’s been very well thought through. They’re all wheelchair-bound while they adjust to the gravity, exercising in swimming pools which are a novelty for Amy because water was understandably a scarce commodity back home.

Oh wait, this is home now, and the spaceport city the family are initially confined to proves to be a big disappointment. Amy had at least been promised big blue skies, but every long day is smog-ridden instead. Her parents still have each other, which makes any new challenge like moving more manageable, but Amy has now lost her best friend. She can’t bear to call Jemmah because she’s going to be forty-five now and can you imagine the alienation you’d feel yourself? Thirty years of extra experience and perspective – she’ll be an adult, perhaps with a family of her own your age – while you’re still fifteen.

 

 

There’s also this: while Amy’s been asleep, technology’s moved on. When she arrives at her new school she discovers that everyone is on this new “net” – they’re wearing glasses with access to stuff which I’ll leave to surprise you – and at first they look as they’re all living in their own world and sharing experiences Amy simply doesn’t understand. McCranie does a bang-up job of emphasising this extra isolation on the page.

However, there are blue skies ahead and indeed overhead and here too McCranie excels at communicating the almost unimaginable wonder of seeing your first ever wide, blue sky with big white birds matching the train for speed. There the bright-as-a-button art really comes into its own, panels replaced by two double-page eye-poppers which bleed right to their bright blue edges.

 

 

For yes, Amy gets to move to Baltissippi Bay by the water, where she discovers snails (snails! Everything is brand-new!), makes friends far faster than she expected and… she still won’t contact Jemmah…

Now can you imagine being Jemmah, and having waited thirty long years to hear from your best childhood friend again, those days drawing nearer and nearer and then nothing?

 

 

The deepest isolation is yet to come, however, for Amy has synesthesia: she has always associated people with flavours, sensing different flavours “emanating” from different individuals, and for the very first time she encounters someone with none. He’s a silver-haired lad who keeps himself to himself, often skipping class, and his peers are all very wary of him.

Only once does Amy sense anything other than a void, in art class, when the boy begins painting, and then there is something other than a terrible, overwhelming emptiness.

A seven-page prologue (yes, prologue, not epilogue!) hints at a very new direction for the next instalment in this series which, let’s remember, isn’t called AMY but SPACE BOY.

Oh, and there’s a criminal subplot so subtly hinted at that I was forever forgetting it existed.

SLH

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

Bad Machinery vol 5: The Case Of The Fire Inside (£14-99, Oni) by John Allison…

 

 

Yet another “small-hands” edition. Yay!

“Lottie, put that yogurt away.”
“Street yogurt’s the best Shauna, well nang.”
“You’re not even using a spoon? You’re using the lid?”
“Yum.”

Hahahaha, I read that page very shortly after a quick lunch on the hoof in Market Square, where upon discovering I hadn’t picked up a disposable spoon for my coconut milk yogurt, I was forced to fashion a makeshift one from the foil lid… It was, indeed, well nang! Not sure what it says about me that the BAD MACHINERY character I seem to have most in common with is Charlotte Grote, though!

 

 

So, the tween detectives of Griswalds Grammar School return with more musings on life, love and lessons, whilst attempting to crack another confounding case. This time around Sonny is besotted with a mysterious new girl who has just arrived at school, and possibly on land… Mildred, meanwhile, is falling for the charms of bad boy Lee Chaplin, though there’s the slight problem of a not-quite-yet-ex who is ready to fight Mildred to the death for her man! Good job Grandpa Joe is on hand to dispense some pearls of hard-won pensioner wisdom on the subject of romance and ill-advised beachcombing…

“Mildred, if the first thing a lad tells you is a lie, you’ve no reason to ever trust him.”
“But he’s so handsome and strong.”
“Lies are like a flower, the truth’s like a brick.”
“Eh?”
“What about you Sonny?”
“I saw a girl swimming in the sea one day. I couldn’t stop dreaming about her. Think she… I think she… turned up at school and sat next to me.”
“You’ve flummoxed him. “Girls who come out of the sea are like… are like a… like…””
“Sonny, listen to me carefully. Did you take anything from the beach?”
“An… unshakeable sense of melancholy?”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking of.”

 

 

This is British farce at its finest. John sets up verbal punchline after punchline, page after page. I think possibly the episodic nature of BAD MACHINERY’s initial release in webcomic form, one page at a time, has finely honed John’s ability to be able to deliver pugilistic punctuation to world heavyweight championship standards. Not sure if that makes him the Rocky Balboa of British humour comics, but I do know that there are at least three more rounds of BAD MACHINERY material already out there on t’interweb for Oni to collect. Knockout!

 

 

What really makes BAD MACHINERY (and John’s university-based GIANT DAYS) such a gleeful pleasure to read, though, over and above the bonkers Scooby Doo-style sleuthery, is it will transport you back in time, to when all you really had to worry about was the sheer terror of working out just how to talk to the object of your erupting adolescent desires, avoiding flailing fisticuffs and torment at the hands of psychotic bullies who are probably now practising corporate law, and coming up with ever more imaginative excuses as to precisely why your homework seemed to have mysteriously not accompanied you to your seat of learning once again…

 

 

John must have an eidetic memory of his formative years, though, because there’s so much I had forgotten about that comes flooding back every time I read BAD MACHINERY. Truly was life ever once so simple but simultaneously so fantastically complicated in such an emotionally jumbled up, hormone-infused manner? Indeed it was and what a pleasure it is to vicariously read all about it without actually having to go through it all again!

 

 

In terms of his art, I continue to marvel at how deceptively simple it looks. He’s refined it to an amazing degree now, it’s so smooth on the eye, yet packed with expression and detail, plus random hilarious visual background gags. (I truly want to believe there is an arcade game called King Beaver in which it is possible to enter Beavergeddon Mode!) It would be fair to say his style has attracted more than a few imitators in recent years, yet they are mere contenders compared to John. Whereas his art feels seamlessly put together, the wannabes are going to need to put in a lot more hours in the illustrative ring before they’re ready to take him on. Cue training montage. Or not.

JR

Buy Bad Machinery vol 5: The Case Of The Fire Inside s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Giant Days: Extra Credit s/c (£13-99, Boom!) by John Allison & Caanan Grall, Lissa Treiman, Jenn St-Onge…

Collects the Giant Days 2016 & 2017 Holiday Specials and the material featured only in the BOOM! Box 2015 & 2016 Mix Tapes. Result!

But given that all sounds rather prosaic considering the madcap merriment contained within, let’s throw the story titles out there for your titillation: ‘What Would Have Happened If Esther, Daisy & Susan Hadn’t Become Friends (And It Was Christmas)?’, the back-up strip ‘How The Fishman Despoiled Christmas’ and ‘Love? Ack, Shelly!’ all penned John and illustrated by various artists. Plus three shorts written and drawn by the man himself, featuring the intrepid reporter Shelly Winters: ‘Fridge Raider’, ‘Music Is Important’ and ‘Destroy History’.

In fact, Shelly Winters also co-stars in one of the main stories as Esther, Susan and Daisy head down to London for a festive visit to stay with Shelly and Ester takes it upon herself to sort out Shelly’s tangled love life… Given what a car crash De Groot is in the romance stakes herself, should she really actually be playing matchmaker or can she actually somehow manage spark up a romance, or two, for Winters?

 

 

The other main story opens proceedings, and it is a classic What If? yarn, including an all-seeing, all-knowing cosmic Daisy depicted as The Watcher seeing how John’s alternative take on the girls first days at Uni would have panned out if they hadn’t hit it off instantly and become first friends.

If you’ve been picking up GIANT DAYS in trades, make sure you don’t miss out on this bonus material. It should be on everyone’s required reading list, as should All Things John Allison!

 

 

Also, please, please note: this does not contain the additional GIANT DAYS 3-ISSUE SELF-PUBLISHED MINI-SERIES drawn by John Allison himself which has never been collected in book form. Fortunately Page 45 has complete sets for sale. It’s like we’re in love, or something.

JR

Buy Giant Days: Extra Credit s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Courtney Crumrin vol 3 s/c (£11-99, Oni) by Ted Naifeh.

“He’ll be lonely without me.”
“He’ll get over it. We all do. There are worse things than loneliness.”

After months spent exploring the inexplicable at her uncle’s house, young Courtney finally revisits her old neighbourhood while her worn-out parents try unsuccessfully to sell their old home. In Courtney’s absence her former best friend Malcolm has fallen under the influence of two house-breaking idiots, because there’s really nothing else for him left. Why, I will keep schtum on, but Malcolm falls out with Courtney painfully as she tries her best to steer him away from the delinquents – again, unsuccessfully.

It’s all very tenderly done, but only the prologue to a tale which will take Courtney on a reluctant journey from the grounds of her school to the Twilight Kingdom in order to find the cure for a curse so carelessly cast on one brother by the other. Now with the benefit of hindsight, I can confirm that it won’t be the last time she ventures there.

 

 

Friendship and responsibility are as ever the key themes on offer, all concealed under a gothic facade of fantasy and danger, and portrayed with the lushest of artwork now in full colour which has drawn, unsurprisingly, the admiration of Charles Vess.

 

 

It’s the third in the series and does touch upon old plot points, but can be read independently and is heartily recommended to the 500+ of you to have already purchased PORCELAIN.

 

 

A quietly touching ending, and a very cool read.

SLH

Buy Courtney Crumrin vol 3 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Multiple Warheads vol 2: Ghost Town s/c (£15-99, Image) by Brandon Graham…

Reprints material originally published in the excellent ISLAND anthology curated by Emma Rios and Brandon Graham himself, along with the MULTIPLE WARHEADS GHOST THRONE one-shot. I had thought Brandon had said he had no intentions of doing any more, but I guess he just couldn’t help himself, which is great news for fans of the series.

The publisher’s sweet whisperings reveal that…

“Black market smuggler of magic organs, Sexica plans to rob the larder of an ancient alligator wizard whose lair hides somewhere within the cliffs of the Waleing wall, while her boyfriend Nikoli searches for clues into the past of the wolf he’s were-bonded to.”

… which sums matters up pretty neatly. This isn’t really a jumping on point for new readers but more of a continuation. If you’re intrigued by how bonkers it all sounds from that one sentence of publisher blurb, you really should read Stephen’s extensive review of MULTIPLE WARHEADS VOLUME ONE which also features some beautiful interior art. Brandon is definitely not trying to be Moebius, but if absurdist, saucy, comedy sci-fi with a distinctive and subtly surreal art style is your thing, this could also be for you!

 

 

I do note with mild bemusement that this volume contains about half the page count of the previous volume for the same price. Page deflation, it’s a terrible thing… But also weirdly this volume is not standard Image trade size, like volume one, but slightly taller and wider. Though, thinking about it, that will be because Island was magazine-sized.

 

 

Still, seems odd to not reduce it by what is a fractional amount for consistency in the trades, but hey ho. Maybe Brandon is going for some sort of multistage rocket design, with a slightly wider, larger second section sitting underneath the first warhead and then the third volume* will be a gigantic over-sized booster which when the three are put together will launch the reader into orbit. Maybe.

*I have no idea whether there ever will be a third volume, but I hope so.

JR

Buy Multiple Warheads vol 2: Ghost Town s/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec vol 1 h/c (£22-99, Fantagraphics) by Jacques Tardi…

Finally back in print! More Tardi reprints to follow.

“I have just noticed something both extraordinary and troubling which I would prefer to disbelieve… Yesterday, walking through the museum, I paused before this 136-million-year-old pterodactyl egg, which I know as if I had laid it myself, and I realised it had hatched! Yes, hatched! Incredible as it may seem! Scientifically impossible, but the evidence is incontrovertible: it has hatched. Observe the hole in the roof.”

“Heavens! Might this have anything to do with the pterodactyl that is all over the papers? What do you think?”

I’d hazard a guess it’s quite likely, myself. Nice to see Fantagraphics going slightly off the wall with their next tranche of Tardi material. Apparently ADELE BLANC-SEC is one of Tardi’s own favourite creations and you can see just from this first volume, collecting together the first two of the nine published works featuring the character, that he’s really thrown himself into creating some wonderfully complex and bizarre stories for the eponymous and somewhat cynical protagonist Miss Blanc-Sec.

 

 

Indeed the series editor at Fantagraphics has commented that they were deliberately holding back on (re-)translating and releasing this material until after they’d put out what they perceived to be some of the more accessible Tardi material (for the American market) such as IT WAS THE WAR OF THE TRENCHES and WEST COAST BLUES. I can understand why they would have taken that route, but I’m pleased that this material is getting its turn, although that is very probably due to the well received Luc Besson-helmed movie The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec already released across most of Europe this year, and very shortly to be released in the UK and US.

 

 

The Adele Blanc-Sec material has some common themes running throughout with occultism, mysticism, mentalism and pseudo science-fiction of the Houdini-esque type prevalent in the pre-WWI era, frequently being the driving force behind the stories, but Tardi also takes the opportunity to take a few satirical swipes and occasionally make a serious point about themes such as corruption and nationalism. He also continues the great French theme in comics of portraying the police as a bunch of bumbling idiots which, let’s be honest, is always good amusement value when done well.

What is really great about this particular Fantagraphics release is we get Tardi in colour again for the first time, with a rather eclectic palette of colours (I’m not sure pterodactyls really were burgundy) enriching some outstanding fine line penmanship. The ligne claire school of artistry, including the typically detailed backgrounds and slightly cartoonish aspect to the characters, is therefore considerably more evident here than on the more heavily penned black and white material released by Fantagraphics before now.

 

 

I’m not making a statement that one style is better than the other, far from it. What it does demonstrate though is that Tardi is obviously an extremely accomplished artist as well as writer. Still, one could spot his hand at a distance of a thousand yards, irrespective of the particular stylistic approach he has chosen to employ. The nice thing though for those of us who’ve come to appreciate his work, is that we know it to be the hallmark of quality.

JR

Buy The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec vol 1 h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec vol 2 h/c (£22-99, Fantagraphics) by Jacques Tardi.

The no-nonsense mademoiselle Blanc-Sec returns for another round or two of occult mentalism and monster-mash madness as first we have the Frankenstein-esque resurrection of a surprisingly suave and well spoken Palaeolithic man demanding vintage cognac and fine cigars upon his wakening, rapidly followed by the escape of all the mummies in the Louvre, plus the one Adele keeps in a display case in her lounge! Don’t expect it to make any sense, you clearly won’t if you read and loved VOLUME ONE of Adele’s extraordinary adventures as I did. Indeed much like, what seems an odd comparison on the face of it I’ll grant you, UMBRELLA ACADEMY you just have to enjoy the ever mounting sense of the ridiculous jammed in page after page, which Tardi is an absolute master at. I also now know why there was no sequel to the ARCTIC MARAUDER as I pondered after reading that fantastic work, as several characters make a brief Benny Hill-style chase reprise here, which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, but did make me chuckle.

 

 

JR

Buy The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec vol 2 h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Hellboy Omnibus vol 2 s/c (£22-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola with Gary Gianni & Mike Mignola with Richard Corben.

“The four-volume Omnibus series along with the two volumes of The Complete Short Stories collect all of Mignola’s award-winning HELLBOY stories in chronological order for a definitive reading experience.

“This 416-page volume covers Hellboy’s adventures from 1998 to 2005, reprinting ‘Conqueror Worm’, ‘Strange Places’, ‘Into the Silent Sea’, and ‘The Right Hand of Doom,’ ‘Box Full of Evil,’ and ‘Being Human’.”

HELLBOY: STRANGE PLACES contained ‘The Third Wish’ and ‘The Island’ which I once reviewed thus:

Hellboy is standing at the edge of the ocean, and, he’s told, the crossroads of his life. Five seconds later and he’s many leagues under the sea and assaulted by weremaids. Should have taken a left, dude.

 

 

Try this book if you like portentous dream sequences, demands with consequences and the chill of the ominous, and we haven’t even begun to speak of the art which has, if at all possible, taken another leap. Mike keeps it dark and spooky with the boldest silhouettes in the business, yet opens it up with majestic design and subtle inlay.

 

 

Also [perhaps earlier – it’s over a decade since I read this]:

Hellboy arrives in Africa, but he’s been expected there longer than he’s lived, and although the beasts don’t want him, the ocean does. Three little wishes for three fishes. Who will be leaving alive?

SLH

Buy Hellboy Omnibus vol 2 s/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Adventures Of John Blake: Mystery Of The Ghost Ship s/c (£9-99, David Fickling Books) by Philip Pullman & Fred Fordham…

“I believe you were a member of the 1929 Einstein-Carmichael expedition.”
“Well?”
“There was a scientist in the party.”
“That’s right.”
“What was he investigating?”
“He didn’t talk much. Was only interested in the experiment. And his son. James, was it?”
“No, John. Very bright boy…”

Rip-snorting, high-seas, high-octane, time-travel, all-ages, hyphen-heavy yarn penned originally for The Phoenix Comic by His Dark Materials author (first and second volumes of the first part of that trilogy, NORTHERN LIGHTS, have been adapted for comics) and adeptly illustrated by able seaman Fred Fordham, who I must admit I wasn’t familiar with, but certainly is a talent with his neat and tidy shipshape ligne claire linework.

 

 

I note, actually, it has just been announced Fred is going to adapt Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ as a graphic novel for Harper Collins, who clearly view him as a safe pair of hands on the proverbial tiller for tackling such a heavyweight literary title. I think that is probably more than enough sailing puns now…

 

 

Cast adrift on the oceans of eternity, buffeted by the ever-changing tides of temporal instability, boy genius John Blake is determined to get his millennia-spanning motley crew back home to their respective eras safely. There are others, however, who covet his time-travelling vessel, the Mary Alice, and will stop at nothing to get their dastardly hands on it!

 

 

Ah, this is a great bit of fun, speculative fiction with Bond-style delightfully preposterous ‘espionage’ elements, courtesy of secret agent Roger <ahem> Blake, and the main bad guy, multi-squillionnaire tech giant Carlos Dahlberg and his enormous super yacht and gigantic guided missiles. I would make allusions to him making up for some inadequacy perhaps, but let’s keep this review as all-ages as the work itself!

Adults will undoubtedly love this boy’s and girl’s own adventure, as John teams up with a young lady called Serena whose daft dad managed to dump her in the drink without a life jacket in the middle of the South Pacific. Now she’s part of the ghost ship’s crew, criss-crossing time in search of safe harbour and answers to explain their peculiar odyssey.

 

 

Can John keep his crew, with the assistance of the eponymously named suave naval intelligence officer, out of Dahlberg’s megalomaniacal clutches?! Or will Carlos finally break the maxim that money can’t buy you everything and achieve his tyrannical ambitions of global, and temporal, total domination?! Why am I using a question mark as well as an exclamation mark?! The answer to the last question, dear reader, is that I am an idiot. For a resolution to the other two queries, however, you will have to read the book…

JR

Buy The Adventures Of John Blake: Mystery Of The Ghost Ship s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Dark Nights: Metal – Dark Knights Rising h/c (£24-99, DC) by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Grant Morrison, Dan Abnett, various & Carmine DiGiandomenico, Philip Tan, Tony S. Daniel, Doug Mahnke…

““D.C.” You wondered what it means, but think about it Bobo… brother…
““Detective Chimp.”
“We’ve watched your life. Immortality has its rewards. We got this fixed back in 2067. The 53rd world is here to help. So… ready to save the Universe, Bobo?”

So that’s what DC means… And obviously Bobo is, now he’s not losing his marbles. The concluding issue in this collection, DARK KNIGHTS RISING: THE WILD HUNT #1, is a glorious rip-snorting ruckus of MULTIVERSITY-inspired madness featuring everyone’s favourite simian Sherlock. Errr… what do you mean you’ve never heard of him? You’ll be telling me you thought DC stood for something else next.

As I was reading this, I thought it felt very much like a Morrison-penned portion of malarkey, so wasn’t remotely surprised to find him co-credited on this issue. No idea of precisely how much he was involved, or if it is purely to acknowledge the use of several of his concepts and characters, but it has the feel of being touched by Morrison at least… which is the typically rum and uncanny sensation you would expect.

 

 

The other seven issues: BATMAN: THE RED DEATH #1, BATMAN: THE DEVASTATOR #1, BATMAN: THE MERCILESS #1, BATMAN: THE MURDER MACHINE #1, BATMAN: THE DROWNED #1, BATMAN: THE DAWNBREAKER #1, THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #1 are essentially mad What If? – or perhaps I should say Evil Elseworld – mash-ups each featuring a Batman, and in one case a Batwoman, from an Earth in the Multiversity already lost to the dark, who has somehow merged or blended or become corrupted with someone else, those unfortunates being: Flash, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aqua Woman, Green Lantern and just for good measure, the Joker.

 

 

So, in other words, these are the origin stories of all the bad guys deployed by the demon Barbatos in the main DARK NIGHTS: METAL series. These creation cameos are all, I must add, fabulously good fun and tortuously and frankly quite sadistically well thought out. So whilst you absolutely do not need this volume to help you understand the metallic mayhem, I can certainly recommend it.

JR

Buy Dark Nights: Metal – Dark Knights Rising h/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’.

Beanworld Omnibus vol 1 s/c (£22-99, Dark Horse) by Larry Marder

Cottons Book 1: The Secret Of The Wind h/c (£16-99, FirstSecond) by Jim Pascoe & Heidi Arnhold

Dressing (£14-99, Koyama) by Michael DeForge

Dumb – Living Without A Voice (£19-99, Fantagraphics) by Georgia Webber

The Complete Future Shocks vol 1 (£19-99, Rebellion) by Alan Moore,  Various & Brian Bolland,  Various

In The Future, We Are Dead (£14-99, Birdcage Bottom Books) by Eva Muller

The Great North Wood (£9-99, Avery Hill) by Tim Bird

The Hypo – The Melancholic Young Lincoln h/c (£22-99, Fantagraphics) by Noah Van Sciver

Izuna Book 2 h/c (£18-99, Humanoids) by Saverio Tenuta & Carita Lupattelli

The Complete Killer s/c (£35-99, Archaia) by  Matz & Luc Jacamon

Moon Face h/c (£29-99, Humanoids) by Alejandro Jodorowsky & Francois Boucq

The Phoenix Colossal Comics Collection vol 1 (£9-99, David Fickling Books) by Jamie Smart, Robert Deas, Laura Ellen Anderson, Dan Boultwood, Joe List, Jess Bradley, Chris Riddell, Mike Smith

Rivers Of London: Cry Fox (£13-99, Titan) by Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovitch & Lee Sullivan

Sandman Overture: Absolute Edition (£110-00, Vertigo) by Neil Gaiman & J.H. Williams III

Southern Bastards vol 4: Gut Check s/c (£14-99, Image) by Jason Aaron & Jason LaTour

Wild’s End vol 3: Journey’s End (£17-99, Boom!) by Dan Abnett & I.N.J. Culbard

Bombshells United vol 1 s/c (£14-99, DC) by Marguerite Bennett & Marguerite Sauvage, various

Dark Nights: Metal – The Resistance s/c (£22-99, DC) by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, various & Howard Porter, Liam Sharp, various

Thanos Wins s/c (£17-99, Marvel) by Donny Cates & Geoff Shaw

The Flowers of Evil Complete vol 3 (£19-50, Kodansha) by Shuzo Oshimi

Gantz: G vol 1 (£12-99, Dark Horse) by Hiroya Oku & Keita Lizuka

My Hero Academica vol 13 (£6-99, Viz) by Kohei Horikoshi

Tokyo Ghoul re: vol 5 (£8-99, Viz) by Sui Ishida

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews June 2018 week three

Wednesday, June 20th, 2018

Featuring Gareth Brookes, Carole Maurel, Mariko Tamaki, Clement Baloup, Farel Dalrymple, Mathieu Bablet, Mairghread Scott, Robin Robinson, Joe Todd-Stanton, Mike Mignola, Duncan Fegredo, Mark Millar, Olivier Coipel.

Afterwords (£5-99, self-published) by Gareth Brookes.

In which Brookes reprises both THE BLACK PROJECT and A THOUSAND COLOURED CASTLES, neither of which you need read before these deeply satisfying self-contained stories, each delirious in its own different way.

On the other hand, if you have already relished either of those graphic novels then you are in for two wildly witty departures / re-treatments, building on what’s gone before, so let’s call them “sequels of sorts”.

I’m far from surprised because Brookes does love to experiment, not just with style and presentation, but with the very media he employs to produce them. Eschewing both digital art and pen on paper, Gareth has a penchant for selecting the least obvious and seemingly most difficult but fascinatingly physical means of construction, each apposite to what’s going down.

“There are things I leave out of course, because I don’t want the trouble to start again.”

Very wise, Richard, very wise. First dates can be a tentative minefield, can’t they?

 

 

THE BLACK PROJECT (which we made Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month) featured scratchboard panels within often elaborate cloth-embroidered frames. Why cloth-embroidered? Well, teenage Richard was stitching his girlfriends. Not stitched them up, but stitching them together. He was creating them from bits and bobs which he found lying around. And then he, ummm, you know… courted them? Wooed them…? Made love to them…?

It was a black comedy, yes.

Now Richard has grown up, found gainful employment, and he thinks he has a better handle on life. Actually, I think he does. He’s kind and considerate, and has certainly a lot lovelier outlook than his boss’s and his boss’s best mate’s. These are two leering, lager-lout lads of a certain hair-receding age whom he works with, along with his dearest Denise whom Richard has been in love with for four years. She’s presented on the page as a radiant if scowling and quite haggard Madonna; or, on another page, as Medusa. Still, eye of the beholder and each to their own, right? I admire everyone who sees beneath the surface.

 

 

Anyway, they all invite a very reluctant Richard out for birthday drinks. He was right to be reluctant on so many levels, but I’m going to leave that for you to discover yourselves. Let us just say that there are developments. There are multiple developments.

Compared to the original, we’re given a little more colour in the green, blue and tangerine stitching on dowdy beige hessian fabric, while the quite hideous, nightmare-co-worker cast, rendered in block black-and-white, glow with a seam of unsettling, vampiric red, slightly off-set as if you’re looking at 3-D pages without the glasses… or as if you’ve been drugged.

 

 

The self-contained “sequel of sorts” to A THOUSAND COLOURED CASTLES is in some ways even cleverer, for in the original, rubbed out on the page in wax crayon, elderly couple Fred and Myriam were living out their quiet, retirement in tranquil suburbia. Fred was and remains profoundly stick-in-the-mud, constantly complaining conservative whereas Myriam’s life seemed far more colourful if alarming, beset as it was with the most vivid and elaborate hallucinations brought on not by a thankfully rare but very real vision impairment called Charles Bonnet Syndrome.

Now Myriam is seeing things for what they really are – tanks in the tree-lined street, bludgeoning the neighbourhood to bits – whereas Fred’s in a world of his own, deliberately filtering reality through a virtual, rose-tinted one: a headset which you can tweak to your heart’s desire. Fred’s heart’s desire is to be reassured / placated / sedated by the increasingly reactionary, culpably oblivious BBC News embodied here by Fiona Bruce. They both see bombshells, but very different ones.

 

 

When Fred is finally persuaded to take a break from virtual reality he still “sees” what he’s been taught to by our manipulative media:

“Ah, oh dear. What a mess.
“But I’m sure the authorities have it all in hand.
“Must stop terrorism, Myriam.”

There’s nothing like a patriotic Royal Jubilee or Wedding street-party celebration for lifting the embattled spirits, is there? It’s all about the art of distraction.

 

 

Meanwhile, whoops, there goes the neighbourhood – quite literally! – along with this politically apathetic and morally bankrupt, blinkered, blinded, heads-in-the-sand, self-centred and so sad excuse for a country.

SLH

Buy Afterwords and read the Page 45 review here

Luisa: Now And Then (£22-99, Humanoids) by Carole Maurel, adapted by Mariko Tamaki.

Here’s an intriguing hypothetical for you:

“What would you do if your fifteen-year-old self showed up at your door?”

Would you, for a start, recognise them immediately and instinctively realise that, however improbable, there must have been some time / space seepage? Would you wince at their lame sense of fashion, chronic acne and well wonky hair? Would you balk at the very possibility that it could even be you, or welcome their arrival as an opportunity to educate, give them great solace or even a kick up the arse?

Let’s flip that a little:

“What would that teenager think of what you’d become?”

Unless you are a teenager reading this review, of course, in which case: can you imagine meeting your 33-year-old self? Who do you imagine you’d be by that age, and what do you think you’d be doing? I mean: for friendship, self-fulfilment and for a living?

 

 

It’s worth having a good old cogitation upon all that before reading this book or even this review, because creator Carole Maurel is going to propel this in a completely different direction from anything that I’d anticipated other than this: modern technology, socio-political progress on the sexuality front will indeed prove satisfyingly pivotal to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, both perspectives are explored here as 15-year-old Luisa Arambol from Chartres wakes one morning on a bus which she’d boarded the night before back in 1995, and is told in no uncertain terms to dismount. She has absolutely no idea where she is, but quickly discovers she’s in Paris.

 

 

 

She attempts to phone home using a credit card at a public call box, but the card is rejected. She tries to buy a phone card in the nearest tabac / café only to be ridiculed for not being in possession of a smart phone. She earnestly tries to pay for the phone card in Francs.

“Is this a joke?”

This is no joke. Poor young Luisa may now know that she is in Paris, but she still has no clue that it’s 2013, a good ten years after Francs in France were discarded for Euros. She’s at her wit’s end.

Naughtily enough, that’s where I’m going to leave you on that thread.

 

 

33-year-old Luisa Arambol, meanwhile, is living in that self-same city in that self-same time, which is 2013. She has inherited the flat which she lives in from her Aunt Aurelia. Although Luisa once had more fulfilling dreams of being an inventive, arty photographer like 23 Envelope’s Vaughan Oliver, she’s perfectly happy with her paid work, photographing foodstuffs to look fancy with dear friend Farid for glossy magazine advertisements. What she’s disgruntled about is her love life: a succession of men she dates enthusiastically at first, but who prove way too mundane once they’re shacked up with together. To be honest, it’s not just them: it really is her. They’re good for a fling, but the reality is really not pressing her buttons at all.

Now, as my early questions suggest, the two are going to come into contact and everything up to that point is perfect, especially young Luisa’s protracted confusion (no one is going come straight out like Doctor Who and ask “Wait – what year is this?”), what she makes of modern technology (“Crazy, Paris is so high tech.”), and the means by which she discovers the date. Also impressive is how credibly Good Samaritan Sasha, who temporarily adopts Luisa in order to help her track down local relatives, reacts to Luisa’s predicament and the personal possessions she finds in her duffel bag. And finally there’s that search for local relatives which of course would be Aunt Aurelia who was still alive back in 1995, and you already know who’s living in that flat now!

Perfect!

 

 

The colours don’t half glow on the page, and the portraiture throughout is delicious, reminding me of SAGA’s Fiona Staples, particularly the double-page spread when each Luisa finally realises the truth about the other’s identity. The clothes all hang just-so off the bodies, the lines are soft, the skin smooth, and the hair fulsome and silky. Everyone’s conditioning regimen is admirable.

But it quickly becomes clear that the questions should have been “What would you do if your fifteen-year-old self showed up at your door and what would that teenager think of what you’d become if you’d long denied your sexuality partly because of an incident during which your fifteen-year-old self failed to support another girl she had a pash on when that other girl was subjected to some seriously vilifying homophobic abuse and ostracism which was then compounded by your mother?”

That’s a very specific question.

 

 

What’s on the page is pretty powerful stuff – and is cleverly tied in to further family history – but it’s what’s not on the page which left me disappointed, which is everything else. None of the other ever so many questions and answers I’d seek of the other are explored, and I found that so frustrating.

There’s also one hell of a lot of incomprehensible crotchetiness throughout on adult Luisa’s part, and she chastises her younger self unforgivingly for being unsure of her leanings when we all know that a fifteen-year-old’s life is both confusing and restrictive. Okay, we can perhaps put that down to adult guilt, but does everyone in Paris treat waiters like dirt? That really rankled.

However, the good news is that a) you’ll like chic Sasha, and b) there are more surprises to come, for although neither of them realises it at first things are still alarmingly in flux, and there is a stunning scene involving a reflection on a restaurant’s floor.

 

 

By the way, that is indeed Mariko Tamaki, the co-creator with cousin Jillian Tamaki of THIS ONE SUMMER and SKIM, whom you see credited for the book’s “English Language Adaptation”.

For more non-genre time travel (i.e. gentle fiction in which the only science-fiction is that you have returned in time to your childhood, please see also Jiro Taniguchi’s flawlessly contemplative A DISTANT NEIGHBOURHOOD.

Lastly, since I posed those two hypotheticals, I think it’s only fair that I append answers of my own.

“What would you do if your teenage self showed up at your door?”

I’d start by reassuring the poor boy – bewildered by what on earth life might be like beyond school – that it’ll all be all right in the end. I don’t know about you, but aged 15 I could not imagine being capable enough of anything to independently earn a living.

“What would that teenager think of what you’d become?”

I believe he’d say, “That makes perfect sense”.

On all counts.

SLH

Buy Luisa: Now And Then and read the Page 45 review here

Vietnamese Memories Book 1: Leaving Saigon (£14-99, Humanoids) by Clement Baloup…

“There were G.I.s everywhere. We used to collect the cartridges they were always dropping…
“…Then we’d whack them to make them explode. They’d go off like firecrackers.
“When you’re a kid, you never think about the dangers. One of us could have gotten killed!”

When us Anglophones hear the word Vietnam, we are so inculcated to think of the ill-fated US war, that often we forget that the roots of that particular conflict actually began several generations before with the French colonial occupation. Well, occupations plural technically, as having been kicked out of what was then named French Indochina by the Japanese towards the end of WW2, the French had the temerity to then try and reoccupy it. The Viet Minh led by Hồ Chí Minh eventually put paid to that after nearly ten bloody years in 1954, before the Americans decided they could do better, and well, we all know how that turned out…

 

 

Anyway, as a child born in France in 1978, Clément Baloup only heard the story of his father’s life as a youngster back in Vietnam, and his subsequent emigration to France, some twenty years later whilst being taught to cook a traditional prawn curry in his dad’s kitchen. That’s the opening ‘memory’ very touchingly portrayed here and which subsequently set Clément on the path of collecting other such stories of the Vietnamese Diaspora to France.  A process that actually began long before, you might suspect, ahead of the main waves of the pejoratively named ‘boat people’ in the seventies, with several thousand immigrants being torn from their families and forcibly shipped to France to work in munitions factories very shortly after the start of WW2. Whilst some were eventually repatriated back to Vietnam several years after the war ended, after repeated requests to the French government who seemed oblivious or perhaps simply not remotely bothered about their plight, others chose to stay behind and forge new lives for themselves.

 

 

All the stories are illustrated in extremely impressive fashion, some in black and white, and some in watercolour and cover a wide variety of experiences, both good and bad. Frequently they touch on both life in Vietnam and then France for the Vietnamese who made the arduous and often dangerous journey to Europe. For most, there was little choice to their sudden exodus, be it forced, or to avoid the impending change in political regime. But it certainly always caused unimaginable upheaval and suffering which often took years to overcome in the face of poverty and prejudice in the new homeland.

 

 

For more Vietnam history, please see Thi Bui’s profoundly moving story of her parents in THE BEST WE COULD DO.

JR

Buy Vietnamese Memories Book 1: Leaving Saigon and read the Page 45 review here

It Will All Hurt (£16-99, Image) by Farel Dalrymple.

“And Almendra feels an ill in the air.”

From the creator of THE WRENCHIES, POP GUN WAR VOL 1, both extensively reviewed, plus POP GUN WAR VOL 2 and – just in – PROXIMA CENTAURI.

The publisher writes:

“A weird, sad, silly, sketchy, and dreamy watercolour fantasy-action quest in which Alemendra Clementine and her crew of anti-social adventurers all come together on a psych-apocalyptic world to take down an evil wizard.

“This Eisner Award-nominated webcomic began as a loose stream-of-consciousness exercise and exploration of the comicbook medium and takes place in the same world as Farel Dalrymple’s THE WRENCHIES. Collects IT WILL ALL HURT #1-3, plus all six chapters of the webcomic.”

 

 

That’s a very fair assessment. There is indeed a loose, sketchbook-like quality to the narrative as likely to drift towards old stones standing round a raised burial mound, the site itself surrounded by the ruins of ancient battlements, as it is to encompass a spherical space capsule whose vulnerable glass viewing screen comes under attack from a long-taloned vampire in a top hat.

 

 

 

And yes, it is indeed the stuff of disorientating nightmares.

“I’m getting that weird feeling again.
“Like watching myself in a bad dream.
“The house is on fire and I am screaming at myself to get out before it’s too late.”

 

 

The crew of anti-social adventurers embark on the sort of fantastical quest you might imagine acting out as seven-year-olds, making it up as you go along. They’re dressed both strange and mundane, brandishing weapons like flaming sticks and heavy iron axes while looking lanky, disconsolate, maybe stoned. Some seem younger and sullen, however belted, booted, suited and caped-up for action. Others practise falconry, magic or martial arts.

 

 

There’s a talking cat (I’ve just doubled the sales), and a rat too.

SLH

Buy It Will All Hurt and read the Page 45 review here

Proxima Centauri #1 of 6 (£3-25, Image) by Farel Dalrymple.

“Get behind the blast glass!”
*
“Don’t freaking lecture me.”
*
“Everything’s so stinking annoying today.”
*
“That thing ate my ride! What a jerk.”

New series from the creator of THE WRENCHIES, POP GUN WAR VOL 1, both extensively reviewed, plus POP GUN WAR VOL 2 and – just in – IT WILL ALL HURT which I also dipped into.

If you enjoyed THE WRENCHIES, then it’s time to rejoin The Scientist and indeed fractious Sherwood, still fretting about his lost brother Orson while frowning and drowning in post-pubescent hormones.

“Don’t forget to drink water, Sherwood.”
“I know.”

 

 

Here’s the publisher:

“4.243 light-years from Earth, the teenage wizard adventurer Sherwood Breadcoat is stuck in the confounding spectral zone on the manufactured dimensional sphere, Proxima Centauri, looking for escape and a way back to his brother while dealing with his confusing emotions, alien creatures, and all sorts of unknown, fantastic dangers. In this issue The Scientist H. Duke sends Sherwood on a salvage mission and gives counsel to the troubled boy in his charge.

“PROXIMA CENTAURI will be six issues of psychedelic science fantasy action comicbook drama starring Sherwood Breadcoat, ‘The Scientist’ Duke Herzog, Dr. EXT the Time Traveler, the ghost M. Parasol, Shakey the Space Wizard, and Dhog Dahog.”

 

 

Dalrymple nails Sherwood’s teenage obstreperousness with giant, proclamatory speech balloons and defiant, sword-brandishing impatience to which The Scientist issues sage and scholarly advice without any thought to the certainty that it’ll mean nothing whatsoever to a self-obsessed teenager:

“Why so impatient to grow up? Learn to be present and your anxiety will subside.”

 

 

It’s hard to be present while under assault from sewer-swarms of monstrous, sharp-toothed insectoids while racing through gravity-shifting concrete jungles and spectacular, architectural retro-futuristic collisions.

There’s some Basil Wolverton about the bloating of the beasts’ heads, and a big love of Moebius in some of the floating landscapes.

 

 

File under “all kinds of crazy” and drink in the varied colour treatments.

SLH

Buy Proxima Centauri #1 and read the Page 45 review here

The Beautiful Death h/c (£21-99, 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.

 

 

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 to begin with. 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 h/c and read the Page 45 review here

The City On The Other Side (£12-99, FirstSecond) by Mairghread Scott & Robin Robinson…

“War and pain raged in the world of Fairy. On both sides.
“But the fairy world is not the only world. The human world continued… unaware of the war that was destroying them as well.”

The publisher blurb burbles…

“The first decade of the twentieth century is coming to a close, and San Francisco is still recovering from the great earthquake of 1906. Isabel watched the destruction safely from her window, sheltered within her high-society world. Isabel isn’t the kind of girl who goes on adventures.

“But that all changes when she stumbles through the invisible barrier that separates the human world from the fairy world. She quickly finds herself caught up in an age-old war and fighting on the side of the Seelie – the good fairies.”

 

 

You see, Isabel might not be the kind of girl who goes on adventures, but she desperately wants to be. However, between her over-protective snob of a high society mother and her absent workaholic sculptor father, she’s completely ignored and stuck oh-so-safely in her room. So when adventure accidentally beckons, she seizes it with both hands and leaps through the Veil, which separates our world from the Fairy realm. With a Fairy civil war raging and the only hope of stopping it being to return an enchanted necklace to its rightful owner, Isabel will soon be getting all the action-packed antics she could ever wish for.

 

 

Definitely one for fans of the likes of AMULET, with its cast of weird and wonderful characters including a feisty talking mushroom called Button, and NAMELESS CITY, for its relentless breakneck pace and desire to make a few pertinent social comments suitable for any time too, this is a very well-written self-contained slice of all-ages fun.

JR

Buy The City On The Other Side and read the Page 45 review here

Arthur And The Golden Rope s/c (£7-99, Flying Eye Books) by Joe Todd-Stanton.

A huge endeavour for a tiny person, this is now out in softcover!

I love a good quest, and this is a most excellent quest involving Thor, Odin and Fenrir, the enormous, sable-coated wolf sired by the trickster god, Loki. It is ever so black and bad tempered!

Rich in the warmest of colours and with a superb sense of scale, HILDA fans are going to lap this up; ZELDA fans too because young Arthur is essentially an Icelandic Link, addicted to exploration and a certain degree of pilfering, forever adding artefacts to his arsenal of treasured possessions.

This includes the Hand of Time, an actual hand (a bit creepy!) which Arthur once discovered high up in an ancient tower, sat on an ancient stone column at the top of some ancient stone steps and bathed from behind in moonlight cascading though a window in the shape of a stopped clock. I imagine Arthur must have successfully interpreted this clue before whipping it away, for the Hand of Time has the power to freeze anyone who touches it – which is a neat piece of self-defence, when you think about it.

It’s probably best to use gloves.

 

 

Arthur’s also adept at making friends in high places, like the mighty red rooster Wind Weaver, nested towards the top of even more ancient, tall, craggy cliffs. Such was Arthur’s fortitude and determination that he managed to climb that nigh-vertical escarpment and return to Wind Weaver her missing egg, against all odds unbroken.

He also once rescued a cat from a tree.

Arthur is going to need to summon all his courage and command his quickest of wits, however, in this daring quest to restore fire to his otherwise frozen town after its gigantic brazier is knocked down and extinguished by Fenrir. I told you it had a bad temper.

To be honest, the townsfolk aren’t that much better, especially the adults. They scowled at Arthur and his adventures, his trophies and trinkets and the little goblin folk who followed him in rootin’, tootin’ celebration after he mediated an end to their war with the fairies. But, battered by Fenrir’s assault, the citizens are sure going to need our young Arthur now, for the only way to restore fire to the town’s brazier is to curry the favour of Thor, and the only way to curry Thor’s favour is to help him defeat the five-hundred-foot Fenrir.

For this meticulous Arthur will need three things: to capture a cat’s footfall, to snip off the roots of a mountain, and remember old lessons learned.

The Asgardians have tried to vanquish the beast by themselves, but Fenrir nearly squished Frejja, barely missed breaking Baldr between its teeth and successfully bit poor Tyr’s arm off. Can frail Arthur triumph where the mighty gods have failed?

 

 

In every all-ages / young-readers’ great graphic novel there must be certain things present including wit, rules and exploration for eyes.

Oh, you tut at the term “rules” but I didn’t write that they couldn’t be broken! What I mean is that a child will see through any gaps in narrative logic just as easily as an adult would, and might even be far less forgiving. They are ever so astute! This is a beauty, so casually foreshadowing whatever will follow so that its pay-off is perfect and caught me completely by surprise. But it’s all there! All of it!

The wit lies both in the background details, the denouement above, and in the keep-them-guessing intrigue which is scattered throughout. How can Arthur possibly capture a cat’s footfall? It’s insane! And a mountain doesn’t have any roots: that had me stumped.

 

 

As to the eye-candy, there are maps – yes, maps! – and so many pages which reward real inspection, from old-duffer Brownstone’s armchair introduction contrasted with his hours-later adieu (look at what’s happened to those bookshelves behind him in the intervening time!) to the mapped-out meandering’s of Arthur’s double-page sea-voyage. There tiny fingers will love to trace the serpentine path of our diminutive hero’s trials and tribulations past pirate ships and old beardy Neptune, through the coils of undulating sea monsters and battling a giant squid which is ever so intent on wrestling Arthur’s oars from him.

Then there’s beardy Brownstone’s initial, proud appearance inside his family vault of exotic heirlooms bathed in a spotlight. Young eyes are immediately invited to scan every shadow-strewn corner for curiosities: there are chests and chalices, a deep-sea diving suit, skulls and statues, a one-eyed owl, things floating in jars, swords, stones, and swords in stones. Oh wait – I think the second one is stuck in a giant eyeball!

 

 

There are swords stuck everywhere in Valhalla’s hall. Can you find them all?

I mentioned Todd-Stanton’s sense of scale – vital for making a quest like this seem as daunting as possible – and it’s everywhere from the fearsome Fenrir who towers over the brazier, and the brazier itself, so vast that it looms large in comparison to the rest of the town when seen from afar. On that very same shot, so high in the sky, you’ll spy that ancient tower which housed The Hand of Time and, on the mountainside opposite, Wind Weaver perched on her nest. Furthermore, Arthur may be small when standing beside adults and smaller still in Thor’s imposing presence, but compared to the goblin folk he’s a giant.

 

 

Finally we come to the gods’ hall library and it is as vast as vast can be. Poor Arthur most read every dusty tome in his research for find the roots of a mountain. You can see him scampering up ladders, balancing books on his head, receiving a nasty surprise, but if you look really, really carefully…

I love it. I love this to bits.

SLH

Buy Arthur And The Golden Rope s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories vol 1 s/c (£22-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben, Duncan Fegredo, Mick McMahon, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Dave Stewart, Matt Hollingsworth, James Sinclair, Clem Robins, Pat Brosseau.

A whopping 368-page volume which covers Hellboy’s adventures from 1947 to 1961 in chronological order (as do all the HELLBOY omnibus editions) kicking almost immediately off with ‘Midnight Circus’ drawn and painted with enormous panache by Duncan Fegredo.

“But he wanted to be a real boy.”

1948 at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence, it’s late at night and quiet.

Scampering secretly through the sleepy, well appointed HQ, a very young Hellboy, his horns still intact, overhears himself being talked of as a terrible threat. It’s all there in the Visions & Revelations of one Arnot De Falvy:

“I saw a city, silent as a tomb, barren as dry bones, and the angel said, “This is Desolation”. And I went down into it and the only living thing there was the creature… In most ways it had the shape and character of a man and was not terrible to look upon… But then I saw in its right hand it held the key to the bottomless pit.”

 

 

So young Hellboy does what you would do at this covert equivalent of a boarding school: he runs away. And something is there to greet him, to entreat him, to seduce and reduce the poor boy to tears.

When the Midnight Circus first appears, the impact is halting. Young Hellboy crouches overlooking through a dry-stone wall the valley the circus’ gigantic tent has been erected in. He’s inked in Fegredo’s Mingola-inspired trademark stark shadows, whereas the circus itself is swathed in misty, miasmatic watercolours as will be everything that transpires within. It’s mesmerising.

 

 

And, oh, what the young boy discovers inside. Whom the young Hellboy discovers inside!

Have you read Pinnochio?

There is so much to commend this, not least of all Duncan Fegredo’s swoonaway art. Long have I compared his gesticulations, dramatically angled wrists and hefty, heavy, laden hands to the mighty French sculptor Rodin. That’s not something I do lightly. But here it suddenly struck me how similar his women are to that of FATALE’s Sean Phillips.

You wait until you see the sunken Galleon.

 

 

If you’ve never read HELLBOY before in your life, this is the perfect introduction. It will leave you with questions, yes, but then you have a whole library to explore, all in print and in stock right here, right now.

Mignola has built up a legend which is why this works so well. There has been foreshadowing aplenty and this is another key part of the puzzle.

You’re just a young lad. All you want to do is what’s best, especially as you grow up. Okay, you shouldn’t have had that smoke, you shouldn’t have made that joke and maybe you shouldn’t have run away. But they are your decisions, surely? They can’t affect anyone else.

“Oh, my boy… what have you done?”

Brrrr….

 

 

Also included: ‘The Crooked Man’, ‘Double Feature of Evil,’ the complete ‘Hellboy in Mexico’ saga, as well as ‘The Corpse.’ ‘The Iron Shoes’ and more.

SLH

Buy Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories vol 1 s/c  and read the Page 45 review here

The Magic Order #1 (£3-25, Image) by Mark Millar & Olivier Coipel…

“They’ve just finished copulating. He’s dreaming about a train journey from his teenage years. She’s just closed her eyes.”
“Is their home secured with any defences?”
“Yes, but I can work around them. There’s a child sleeping at the end of the corridor, and I think I’ll be able to go through him.”

Mark Millar returns with a story in which a magician with a way with words manages to sell his fêted comics company to a large entertainment giant for megabucks and lives happily ever after. Wait a minute… his autobiography isn’t out yet!

Millar is back, though, with his first ‘Netflix’ comic, featuring a story about five clans of undercover magicians who have protected our world from unseen magical threats for generations who are now about to fall out big style. So, sort of like a mash-up between Doctor Strange and East Enders then?

 

 

Fortunately not, but this is certainly no tale of happy families as one of the prestidigitators boldly begins a power grab and starts bumping off the others in a not-so covert fashion with the aid of a shadowy, sinister figure wearing a highwayman’s hat. Perhaps a cheeky nod to 2000AD’s Brigand Doom?

 

 

Plus, even within the various households, it seems that whilst there are those who embrace the thrill of waving their wands about, both publically and in private, there are some adepts who want to ditch the glamours and live a life more ordinary. Unfortunately, a declaration of being out of the game doesn’t mean there isn’t still going to be a target on your head.

 

 

After this opener, I have to say I’m totally entranced by Millar’s new top hat of tricks. Ah, that hoodoo that you do, Mark, when you’re on top form. There’s sufficient depth to the story and the characters right from the off which convinces me this six issue series will be on the level of the likes of JUPITER’S LEGACY and SUPERIOR. I trust this won’t prove to be an illusion.

 

 

Phenomenally fabulous art from Marvel stalwart Oliver HOUSE OF M Coipel only adds to the spectacle, and either Coipel or colourist Dave Stewart have given it a softer, smudged feel which renders it all suitably ethereal. Bravo gentlemen!

JR

Buy The Magic Order #1 and read the Page 45 review here

Voices Of A Distant Star (£10-99, Vertical) by Makoto Shinkai & Mizu Sahara…

“Award-winning director and author Makoto Shinkai offers a romantic sci-fi tale about young love and space adventure, based on his 2003 animated film. Sixteen-year-old Mikako Nagamine enlists as a pilot to fight in the interstellar war against a force of alien invaders, leaving behind her one true love. Mikako’s only connection to Noboru Terao, who’s living the life of an ordinary high school student, is through cell-phone text messages. As Mikoko travels farther away, it starts to take longer and longer for Noboru to receive her messages, until finally one arrives eight years and seven months after she sent it. When at last the fighting ends, she is left stranded on the spacecraft carrier.”

I’ve actually excised the final couple of sentences of the publisher’s blurb as I felt we were drifting dangerously into spoiler territory faster than Mikoko was last seen drifting into deep space. If you like your romance to smoulder at a low injection burn rather than going straight to escape velocity this could possibly be for you. I haven’t seen the film, which came first, so I can’t comment on the similarities / differences though the artist comments in his “sort of an afterword” that he imagines fans of the film will feel there are some aspects lacking or disappointing.

 

 

I have to say there is very, very little actually going on in terms of plot here. It is, in essence, two people clinging on to the single thread of the teenage romance that they never actually had. Now, separated increasingly by space and time, it seems like they never, ever will. But still they keep in touch, in classically ultra-restrained Japanese fashion, because neither is willing to let go.

 

 

The final chapter or two hint at more to come (again, maybe there is in the film by the sounds of it) and there’s a decision which perhaps really could have been made a lot sooner, if only one of the star-blocked lovers had spent a bit more time thinking about things rationally instead of mooching around aimlessly waiting for angst-ridden interstellar text messages.

JR

Buy Voices Of A Distant Star 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’.

 

 

Bad Machinery vol 5: The Case Of The Fire Inside s/c (£11-99, Oni) by John Allison

Giant Days: Extra Credit s/c (£13-99, Boom!) by John Allison & Caanan Grall, Lissa Treiman, Jenn St-Onge

Cerebus vol 10: Minds (Remastered Edition) (£26-99, Aardvark Vanaheim Inc.) by Dave Sim & Gerhard

Courtney Crumrin vol 3 s/c (£11-99, Oni) by Ted Naifeh

Cucumber Quest vol 3: The Melody Kingdom s/c (£11-99, FirstSecond) by Gigi D.G.

Escaping Wars And Waves: Encounters With Syrian Refugees (£19-99, Myriad) by Olivier Kugler

Escapo h/c (£22-99, Z2 Comics) by Paul Pope

Hellboy Omnibus vol 2 s/c (£22-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, Gary Gianni

Hit-Girl vol 1: In Colombia s/c (£13-99, Image) by Mark Millar & Ricardo Lopez Ortiz

Julian Is A Mermaid h/c (£11-99, Walker Books) by Jessica Love

Legend Of Zelda Encyclopedia h/c (£35-50, Dark Horse) by various

Multiple Warheads vol 2: Ghost Town s/c (£15-99, Image) by Brandon Graham

Space Boy vol 1 s/c (£9-99, Dark Horse) by Stephen McCranie

The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec vol 1 h/c (£22-99, Fantagraphics) by Jacques Tardi

The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec vol 2 h/c (£22-99, Fantagraphics) by Jacques Tardi

They Say Blue h/c (£12-99, Abrams) by Jillian Tamaki

Batman: Detective Comics vol 6: Fall Of The Batmen s/c (Rebirth) (£16-99, DC) by James Tynion IV & Joe Bennett, various

Dark Nights: Metal – Dark Knights Rising h/c (£24-99, DC) by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Grant Morrison, Dan Abnett, various & Carmine DiGiandomenico, Philip Tan, Tony S. Daniel, Doug Mahnke

Justice League vol 6: People Vs The Justice League s/c (Rebirth) (£12-99, DC) by Christopher Priest & Pete Woods, Philippe Briones, Marco Santucci

Trinity vol 2: Dead Space s/c (£12-99, DC) by Francis Manapul, Cullen Bunn & various

Amazing Spider-Man vol 8: Worldwide s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Dan Slott, Christos Gage, David Hein & Stuart Immonen, Cory Smith, Mike Hawthorne, Todd Nauck, Marcus To

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 8: My Best Friend’s Squirrel s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Ryan North & Erica Henderson

Weapon X vol 3: Modern Warfare s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente & Yildiray Cinar, Roland Boschi, Andrea Sorrentino

 

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews June 2018 week two

Wednesday, June 13th, 2018

Featuring Peter Hoey, Maria Hoey, Nick Drnaso, Erin Nations, Vero Cazot, Julie Rocheleau, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Leslie Hung, Sophie Campbell, Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Greg Capullo, Mikel Janin, Alvaro Martinez

Coin-Op Comics Anthology h/c 1997-2017 (£26-99, Top Shelf) by Peter Hoey, Maria Hoey.

 

 

“They say that the best things in life are free, but being stuck on a videotape isn’t one of them.”

We will return to that anon, but I hope it’s introduced the requisite element of intrigue.

The finest collection of comics that I have seen since BUILDING STORIES, I rate this right up there with Chris Ware for craft, composition and complexity, but the variety of treatments is staggering, and it messes with the medium – with the very possibilities of sequential-art narrative – like nothing at all that I can recall.

 

 

And there are dozens of other contenders, I know, but the Hoeys do it in such depth, over and over again. I recall seeing their ‘Anatomy of a Pratfall’ in BEST AMERICAN COMICS, curated by Alison Bechdel in 2011 when I wrote, not very clearly so I’ve rearranged it a little:

“Six silent pages of a single street seen from the same vantage point, each page is divided into 12 separate grey and peach panels within which something significant is happening. After successive disasters strike in a domino effect you’ll want to go back and laugh yourself senseless at the window cleaner’s seemingly unfinished artistry.”

X marks the spot. And isn’t a piano always involved?

 

 

Time isn’t passing between panels in the traditional way, only between pages: the grid is used instead to focus your attention on the individual elements coming catastrophically into play.

‘Jingle In July’ and ‘The Slippery Lobster’ work in much the same way, the latter being a maritime cross-lane collision-fest which only the dolphins and storks survive, so after a few of these the opening scenarios become akin to a puzzle, a quiz or a question: an opening tableau inviting you to wonder what on earth will happen next.

 

 

Far more mischievous, however, is their most recent iteration and evolution of this game, ‘The Windy Parade’, in which there is a hell of a lot more going on. It bundles together several separate stories, many of which converge, and some of whose protagonists seem to contravene quite defiantly what we in the west consider to be the rules of reading comics (left-to-right, then down a row with a type-writer “ting!” before proceeding left-to-right once more) but it is just an illusion predicated upon the strength of long-ingrained predisposition… (pause)… apart from the very final tier in which time does indeed pass between panels, as the pigeons tell the last of their cumulatively funny jokes and, ridiculously, one of the parade’s human onlookers, oblivious to everything else, gets a good guffaw out of it.

Shall we take an inventory of that six-page story? Two different love affairs, two wallets in diverse jeopardy, two defenestrations, police pursuit, dinner and drinks, a graphic novel first pitched then being pitched out of the window, and a giant, inflatable rabbit being ravished from behind by a blown-up superhero.

 

 

If you’re a cinephile or into jazz, you’ll find this even more up your alley, for the Hoeys too are fixated on both, and are fiercely well informed. They present individual histories and portraits of jazz musicians, but when it comes to the movies they truly triumph. ‘The Trials Of Orson Welles’ features not Orson Welles himself but half a dozen fictional characters, portrayed by Orson Welles in different films, interacting.

Even more impressive, however, ‘The People vs Nicholas Ray’ is a meticulously researched snap-shot documentary of the director of ‘Rebel Without A Cause’. By cross-referencing Ray’s own proclamations with quotes from his peers and protégés like Elia Kazan, François Truggaut and Jim Jarmush, then the films’ various stars like estranged wife Gloria Grahame (why were they estranged? oh good grief!) plus Natalie Wood who went up against a vindictive Joan Crawford in ‘Johnny Guitar’, Peter and Maria form a singularly affecting insight into the director’s personal and professional direction.

“’I’m A Stranger Here Myself’ was the working title for nearly all my films.”

 

 

They also have a rich love of rhymes, and this pairing of clichés is artfully arranged on the page with their ever-present and often concentric circles, here spooling film:

“Double talk, forward leaning,
“Writers block, hidden meaning.

“Split screen, close up smile,
“The way you walk the longest mile.

“Eye line, hand in glove,
“Running time, sea of love.

“Two shot cutaway,
“Look here comes that raining day.”

When reading it, I cannot get out of my head Billy McKenzie’s dead-tone intonation during the Associates’ ‘Fever In The Shadows’ b-side, along with his female co-conspirator. No? Try Grace Jones’s dead-pan instead.

“Conspiracies” is a word I underlined three times in my notes, and although I could not begin to match Josh O’Neill’s exceptionally eloquent introduction to this album, if I were to characterise this collection further I’d choose words like circles and circuits, connections, reflections, control, contradictions and confrontations; that which lurks so substantially beneath the surface, that which lurks unseen without and beyond, collapse into chaos and that dear old chestnut, mortality.

There are two particularly poignant stories involving the extinction of obsolete automata.

 

 

‘I Built You First’, written by C.P. Freund (a journalist with decidedly recondite interests) is infused with a giddy, M.C. Escher sensibility. In it, one robot, above, repeatedly challenges its suicidal predecessor below and is each time rebutted with an insistent reminder of its precedence. Here on the first page, the challenge is issued upside down from a boat being rowed on the watery ceiling:

“You are wrecked, my dear robot (his old friend said),
“And your sensory data’s dispersed!
“What’s the shape of the world that you’ve built in your head?”
Shot the other: “I built you first”.”

As to “shot”, he’s just put a gun to his own head.

Similarly, the last line on the third page, “Snapped the other: “I suspended you first””, is issued as the android breaks its neck by hanging. It’s all pretty tight in COIN-OP.

 

 

‘Valse Mechanique’ is a less formal affair except in its dress code which is strictly black tie. A steampunk waltz as if seen on sepia film footage a century ago, it’s set in a ballroom full of robots so run down that their time has almost run out. Maria sings her final song to the assembled throng, then sacrifices her head and its constituent cogs so that the others can go on a little longer.

You’ve heard of cannibalizing a machine for spare parts…?

 

 

A couple of strips – when this landscape hardcover is folded out, it is hard to think of them in terms other than strips – the Hoeys present parallel narratives (the inner and outer life) layered in tandem along with the accompanying illustrations.

‘The Inter-Office Memo’ is where you will first come in, and it is entirely up to you how you read it: one page at a time in full, or each individual thread at a time from start to finish. The first page is surrounded by old-fashioned city skyscrapers (think Seth), while our protagonist strides through the open-office call centre, each of whose operatives being very specific about the numbers involved. Without, you will find another numbered narrative which starts off all concrete (about the workers, the interconnected office space and the building which houses it), but becomes increasingly and insidiously abstract as we move into the shadowy hidden corporate world or shell companies etc:

“25. Their unseen hands guided and shaped a seemingly disparate group of companies to the completion of their singular intention, one that still remains beyond the prying eyes of the outside world, its limits known only to its creators.”

The final numbers in the circled narrative are 27, then 3¹, 3² and 3³ – which is 27.

 

 

Meanwhile, the city begins to give way to a jungle while the endless corridors become flooded with rising water until a small boat steams by, our protagonist desperately hitches a life-saving lift, only to discover a waterfall ahead…

Please see “if I were to characterise this collection…”

 

 

Before you begin this book, you should probably be aware that the original COIN-OP comics are collected in reverse chronological order, culminating in Peter and Maria’s collaborations within the pages of the old BLAB! anthology. I mention this now, because I don’t want it to be the review’s final sentence, which I’ve already settled upon with a very self-indulgent chortle.

Finally for now, let’s return to where we came in with the recurrent, forever hapless, down-and-out dogs, Saltz & Pepz, who have found themselves trapped in a loop on a videotape. More specifically, they’ve become trapped on one of those two-person handcars you used to see so often in silent black and white films, often involving a chase in which time’s running out.

 

 

It’s called ‘Now Available On VHS’ and time is indeed running out, for although each time the tape is played they become more self-aware, they’re only becoming self-aware because the tape is degrading, and soon it will degrade so far that it snaps.

For the first three pages the top tier of narrative only alternates between two images, Saltz then Pepz pushing down to propel the handcar against a monotonously identical landscape. The endless track is identical in third tier too, obscured only when Saltz’s or Pepz’s heads pop up on the other’s push.

However, the remote appears to be losing control too, and eventually – finally after all this time of being at the mercy of outside forces they have no agency over (they’re homeless throughout the stories) – there is a tiny aperture, an opportunity for action.

 

 

SLH

Buy Coin Op Comics Anthology h/c 1997-2017 and read the Page 45 review here

About Betty’s Boob h/c (£26-99, Archaia) by Vero Cazot & Julie Rocheleau.

An exhilarating, fast-moving, heart-palpitating gala performance, I hereby fill the auditorium with thunderous applause!

Songs sung aside, it’s a largely wordless graphic novel full of exotic sights, dextrous dances and so many sounds in which Elisabeth is adopted by a creative community of burlesque cabaret artists who are as supportive and nurturing off stage as they are flamboyant, inventive and cheeky. Got to love a lyric like this:

“My love button’s poking
“Its head out for a stroking!”

That would be your gently suggested adults-only advisement, for this features a glorious amount of equal-opportunities full-frontal nudity which is absolutely essential to its celebratory message about being proud of your body.

Alas, it’ll take Elisabeth a long and emotionally tumultuous journey to get there, but get there she shall!

 

 

“If you cannot look at me anymore,
“I do not want to see you anymore!”

The beginning is blunt and quite brutal for our protagonist, who wakes up in a hospital bed, clothed in a clinical gown, her head shaved, her energy depleted, and one breast missing post-mastectomy.

 

 

Frantically searching the ward in a flurry of motion, Betty demands her old boob back.  The nipple-ringed breast is retrieved, presented to her in a gift-wrapped, ribboned box and lovingly admired by both patient and nurse. But in the box it stays, and you won’t discover its final fate until late into the graphic novel. Instead, Elisabeth is immediately determined to move on and adjust as best she can, dressing herself up smartly, applying make-up and a wig and marching her frazzled man back home. Yes, her lover has passed out in shock twice already.

 

 

Oh so positively, she dolls herself up further, while he uncorks wine, and dances twirling back into the living room, a rosy red apple popped into the cup of her bra. A tender kiss later and there’s a love-heart and laughter and everything seems to be going so much better…

 

 

But then – although there are ever so many more ups and downs yet to come – the most poignant moment for me is almost immediately afterwards, when the man, after inviting her into the bed with a reassuring pat on the sheets, kisses Elisabeth not on the lovingly presented and puckered lips, but on the forehead. Alarmed, she reaches out, but he lunges for the lamp, switches it off and rolls over, leaving her alone on the very far side of the bed.

 

 

Already the individuals’ moods have been colourfully controlled with lots of rich reds and fresh, healthy creams, but also back in the ward with queasy greens and more sickly yellows for when our male visitor becomes instead the passed-out patient, and needs to have his own blood pressure taken!

 

 

Now the graphic novel grows even more satirical, for where do you suppose she works? Elisabeth is a cashier at a parfumier which is so upmarket that its central chandelier cascades with crystals, spotlit from above. Security cameras are trained on the department floor to search out shoplifters, for sure, but so many are trained on the staff too, with close-ups on their chests, and these screens are overseen by a Cruella Deville-like lady with enormous, dangling, dollar-sign earrings. The shop assistants, meanwhile, are all decked out in t-shirts adorned by the retailer’s logo, which is a symmetrical, stylised heart as if mounted on a pedestal. This, of course, sits over their supposedly symmetrical breasts – wouldn’t you just know it? – that company’s contract stipulates that all employees must have “two boobs” (each of a certain weight!) otherwise it is “termination” time.

I wouldn’t call it too much of stretch to call this corporation somewhat superficial.

 

 

Our obsession with symmetry (I only ever had one dagger earring on the left; now one eyebrow ring instead) is part of the heart of this story. Wait until Liz’s lover returns home, the maid immediately spotting his one-sided parting and correcting it with a comb in a corridor which is improbably symmetrical in its ornaments, before presenting him to his parents! They are not amused (nor are their two dogs) for kerfuffle that causes their mirrored seating arrangements is extreme!

We’ve only just begun – Elisabeth has a lot of chaotic leaping and running round to do, initially after her wig which takes to the wing – but I’m still going to leave it there.

 

 

Golly, but there’s a lot of energy on offer, so much sweeping movement and gay abandon, from arms outstretched and tassled tits a-twisting to robes flying high and flung off, and the gesticulations during the dazzling routines are thrilling (Elisabeth’s contrastingly tentative to begin with, but once her confidence is boosted, she’ll get there). Red wine will be drunk and high heels will be kicked off, for there are far happier times ahead.

“No body is perfect, Elisabeth” is a chapter I loved dearly – if you love female forms in particular in all their diversity, you are in for a spellbinding treat – along with this sentiment towards the end:

“What are you doing now?”
“Whatever I want.”

 

 

Before we conclude, however, I highly recommend Jennifer Hayden’s autobiographical THE STORY OF MY TITS, which in spite of its most excellent title is a lot less glib than it looks. Much considered thought with some considerable scope, Hayden comes to terms with a double-mastectomy, and covers to much that led up to it and what follows.

SLH

Buy About Betty’s Boob h/c and read the Page 45 review here

Sabrina (£16-99, Granta) by Nick Drnaso..

“What did you think?”
“There were some interesting ideas, but I felt empty when it was over.”
“Yeah, it was a good kind of empty feeling though, did Teddy read it?”
“Oh no, he’s not much of a reader.”

From the creator of BEVERLY which I loved and seemingly everyone else ignored – okay, it did win an L.A.  Times Book Prize, but despite that prize and my review it didn’t seem to translate into huge sales – comes a work you’re all now falling over yourselves to pick up in store and online. Amazing what a glowing review in Guardian by Chris Ware can do. Just for the record, for what it’s worth, I loved this too. Allow me to elaborate…

 

 

Firstly, that pull quote above sums up exactly how I felt when I finished. Though I don’t know anyone called Teddy, bibliophobe or otherwise. This work is an extraordinary overlapping and blending of so many fascinating ideas, issues and concepts including dealing with loss, being utterly unable to help someone deal with loss, mental illness, conspiracy theories, the seemingly uncontrollable spread of indistinguishable information and misinformation with which the internet is now saturated on mainstream news sites, on social media and in chatrooms, plus so much more besides. It’s a psychologically degrading, powerful mix that may well leave you feeling quite fatigued and perhaps a little more defenceless in face of the seemingly relentless and unpredictable insanity of the modern world. Well, that was my vibe.

 

 

But, despite feeling empty and also slightly emotionally blended myself when it was over, it was indeed a good kind of empty feeling. Though, I will categorically and emphatically restate for the record I don’t know anyone called Teddy. Actually, I do, thinking about it. He plays jazz trumpet professionally, but he doesn’t read comics. As least as far as I am aware. Which is a shame, because I think he might quite like them. Now, only I know at this point whether I am talking complete bullshit or dealing in facts*. Much like the deluge of both one receives when encountering any topic whatsoever on the internet these days. Though anything involving a degree of criminality, politics and medical advice seem particularly prone to, shall we say, wide-ranging opinions.

The empty feeling arose because I was left bemused by the ending. On the bare face of it, it is one of the most anti-climatic and perhaps unresolved endings I think I’ve ever read. The ‘perhaps’ is partly because of an ever-more sneaking suspicion I had building through the entire work was not addressed or resolved in any way. It is entirely possible, though, I had been led right up the proverbial garden path, quite deliberately so by Mr. Drnaso. Possibly paths plural. In fact, maybe even something akin to Hampton Court Maze for all I know. However, the more I reflected on it, the two-page epilogue that concludes this work was highly appropriate and probably note perfect.

 

 

The pull quote, by the way, comes from the last conversation between the titular Sabrina, domiciled in Chicago and shortly about to vanish off the face of the earth, and her younger sister Sandra. The Teddy in question is Sabrina’s boyfriend, who, rendered utterly dysfunctional, well, non-functional pretty much, in the face of her disappearance has decided to take off for Colorado to go stay with marginal childhood school friend Calvin, now in the US Air Force working at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado in some nebulous security position.

 

 

All Teddy does pretty much all day is sit around Calvin’s house whilst he’s at work, listening to talk radio, one particular conspiracy theory slinger in particular being his rabid host of choice. Calvin, meanwhile, puzzled by the placid behaviour of his almost forgotten friend, whom, frankly, he was astonished called him at all, has started surfing the internet to try and get a handle on Sabrina’s disappearance and Teddy’s sudden arrival.

When a disturbing video hits the news and the media finally learn of Teddy’s whereabouts, Calvin finds not only his apartment and online presence being targeted by the legitimate broadcast media, but also those who have already got their minds firmly made up and equally firmly closed about Sabrina’s whereabouts. And those loony tunes aren’t above a few not-so-thinly veiled threats to try and ensure the, sorry their, truth comes to light…

 

 

One of the many clever little tricks to this work, was that alongside the clearly photoshopped / edited / blatantly made-up fake news evidence that finds its way into the wider public, and our own consciousness, is that I’m sure I spotted some odd inconsistencies amongst the supposed verified facts. It set me thinking, and kept me thinking, that I knew what was really happening. Right up until that ending…

In some ways, Calvin, grappling with being apart from his estranged wife and child in Florida and whether to take some covert black ops job he’s apparently a shoe-in for if he wants it, is the main character. He is our appointed representative in this world, with direct insight into Teddy’s very small one. Which is a very strange, and at times, very strained place to be. But once Calvin starts coming under direct electronic attack from the trolls, he finds his own peace of mind rapidly frazzling too. By the time the pre-ending ending rolled around, I was actually far more engaged in hoping Calvin got a happy ending than Teddy. Well, he gets an ending… And this is yours.

JR

Buy Sabrina and read the Page 45 review here

Gumballs s/c (£17-99, Top Shelf) by Erin Nations.

“My face has exploded in zits. I haven’t been this zitty since I was thirteen.”
“Let’s play connect the dots! At least let me drawn some constellations. I think I see Orion on your cheek.”

Helpfully, that playful observation came from the creator’s cat.

Erin Nations is a very funny guy!

He also has that knack for recalling absurd interactions which can only leave you scratching your head.  Sometimes he’s stopped in the middle of the street by complete randos who appear compelled to draw him into the sort of conversations you never asked for, debates you don’t want, and a barrage of personal questions you most certainly didn’t invite. Against all odds, Erin answers with a degree of bemused courtesy and restraint that they don’t deserve.

“The devil…”
“What?”
“The devil knows where you are going.”
“What are you implying?”
“The devil… he knows… prayer helps…”
“Good to know.”

 

 

Often they’re with customers at the grocery store where he’s worked in for 16 years.

“Can I get 24 balloons?”
“Yeah, what colours would you like?”
“Primary colours. Don’t forget orange and green.”

As Erin slightly more wryly observes, the customer always know best. 16 years of 40-hours-a-week experience does not make you an expert – or even 25+. I remember a media student kindly informing me that Marjane Satrapi’s PERSEPOLIS wasn’t a comic.

“Umm, it honestly is.”
“No, it’s autobiography.”
“I think you’re confused the medium with the genre.”
“Well, I’m studying it, so I should know.”

 

 

Peppered with fictional, speculative portraits of people posting personal ads, and the equally fictional poor, gay Tobias attempting to strike up conversations with dreamboats (badly – his proposed pick-up methods / messages are hilarious!), these are mostly autobiographical musings with clean, sharp lines, invitingly cool, bright, breezy colours and remarkably square jaws. Some of the memories are about being born a triplet (invited to a birthday party, they’re expected to each give a gift; when inviting a friend themselves, they only receive one present between the three of them), others are daily cycling journeys round Portland or trips further afield.

Mostly, however, they’re about anxieties in general like the crippling paralysis before picking up a phone and social awkwardness in a crowd (so into Page 45’s ever-expanding Mental Health Section this so usefully goes; no one need think they’re alone), and about so many of the all-too-real additional difficulties involved in being trans and the process of transitioning itself.

 

 

As such, it’s an invaluable eye-opener about so much that so many of us take for granted including restrooms, obviously, but far less obviously when the best time is to come out to your colleagues when you’ve worked with the same company for so many years. Before you begin? Before they notice? After they’ve noticed? It’s equally invaluable reference for those who’ve yet to begin this process, for in additional Erin is commendably candid about what to expect physically and mentally during Hormone Replacement Therapy, taking you through the first seven weeks, then later the first seven months. Without removing his clothes (“It’s just not gonna happen”).

“How do you feel?”
“I feel like I’m going through menopause and puberty at the same time.”

Ooooh, you get to do spots twice in your life – lovely! Hey, no pain, no gain, and there is everything to gain here, especially decreasing dysphoria. Responsibly, Erin considers the potential long-term effects testosterone could have on his health, but there are enormous benefits too including an almost immediate energy boost and an increased sex drive as well as a gradual surge in self-confidence. I’ll leave all the details to Erin: he’d probably like you to buy his book.

Some people are going to be dicks about it – haters gonna hate – but there’s a glorious short story called ‘Dive Bar’ in a dinner where an old lady with hunched shoulders, serving Erin and his mate, asks for ID. Erin’s is a driving licence still categorically classifying him “sex: F”.

“You cut your hair,” the old lady observes.
“Yeah.”
“So, what can I get you gentlemen?”

 

 

 

She totally got it, but in other instances, not so much: a woman on a bus is just plain weird and spoiling for a fight, while someone wizened, on a walking stick, begins thus:

“You’re not a guy, are you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“That guy was calling you sir.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess it’s none of my business.”

Hmmm…. Maybe you should have had that last thought first.

Other tales include failing to fit in at a comicbook convention simply because you’ve never having seen Star Wars (a fellow comics creator: “You should leave.” “I made sure to not tell them that I’ve never read Harry Potter, I’m clueless about anime, and I’m not a fan of superhero comics.”), plus childhood recollections about the triplets fighting (I had entirely forgotten about carpet burns!) and a seemingly haunted board game called Mall Madness (you’d be pretty spooked too).

There is, understandably, an awful lot of terrible, pained handwringing about using gender-specific public restrooms and indeed workplace restrooms when you’ve yet to come out, and if you’ve not considered how profoundly that would impact on your life, think about how often you urinate every day! Imagine, then, all the worry you’d experience, daily, in anticipation, during and after.

 

 

I want to emphasise, however, that this is no heavy read full of targeted anger but an honest-to-god entertainment along with astute behavioural observations which are seriously worth contemplating. Plus I adore any work which opens windows onto other people’s lives for the greater empathy through understanding they afford me. Lord knows, we need more of that in this world. But also, I’m instinctively curious which is why conversation is right up there for me with the best things on earth.

I won’t lie to you, though: ‘Breakroom’ hit home. As Erin later notes, “I try to call people out when they treat women (or anyone marginalised) as inferior. It’s not easy because it’s uncomfortable, but being silent is just as bad as being compliant”. No, it’s not always easy, especially when you risk compromising yourself in a battle you’re not yet quite fit to fight, so ‘Breakroom’ – when Erin fails to stand up and be counted after a co-worker proves deeply insensitive, not knowing that Erin’s transitioning – will give you much pause for hopefully compassionate thought.

SLH

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

Snotgirl vol 2: California Screaming (£14-50, Image) by Bryan Lee O’Malley & Leslie Hung.

“They don’t trust me to be on my own.”

If you got a slight shiver there, and a lick of whiplash at the arresting end to book one, this pursues this increasingly dark path further; and if you thought that the manipulative Caroline, above, was the real problem, then I’m no longer so sure.

I believe, in that scene, that she’s been sedated. It’s all in Leslie Hung’s art: in normally effusive Caroline’s more languid body language. Plus those particular pages seem to swim in the sort of colour quality you’d find refracted and reflected throughout an aquarium.

Are you wondering who “they” may be?

What I’m attempting to convey is that this series isn’t necessarily all that it appears on the surface.

 

 

Its surface is shiny enough – let’s call it magazine gloss – and vastly entertaining it is too with its up-to-date take on superficial social trends and ridiculous slang which SECONDS, SCOTT PILGRIM and LOST AT SEA’s Bryan Lee O’Malley delights in contributing to. When introducing the various strands of your extracurricular life to each other, for example, you’re practising “friendtegration”, and this is the sort of set who never phone, only text each other (even from the other side of plate glass windows), and proclaim “We have a mutual” rather than “We have a mutual acquaintance”.

They’ll be going to a self-serving convention called Thankstravaganza soon, built on the same site where a fashion blogger was recently murdered. Well, she’s not going to take that lying down.

 

 

I’ll be back on that track in a second. In the meantime, here’s how I introduced SNOTGIRL VOL 1: GREEN HAIR DON’T CARE

This is the sort of comic in which the line “Ok, back to reality” will have you snorting at its delusion. It’s fresh, full of fun, and has more jokes per page than anything other than a John Allison comic.

Meet Lottie Person, who seems so serene on the surface.

“I’m fresh. I’m fun. It’s just who I am.”

A fashion blogger with glossy green hair and a high hit rate, her life is pretty much perfect.

Her fans are devoted (she knows).
Her blogs are the best (she believes).
And that goes without saying (she blasés).
New verb!

“Except my friends are all horrible people.
“And my boyfriend decided we’re on a break.
“And oh yeah -”

OH NO!

“I have allergies.”

Also: huge hang-ups, such a thick catalogue of insecurities that it would need indexing, and a public veneer to sustain which is very high maintenance during any substantial pollen count.

 

 

 

It was (and continues to be) roaringly good fun, but then Caroline crept spellbindingly into her life and Lottie became fixated. There was an accident – which might have had something to do with Lottie’s trial run of a new anti-allergenic medication – and then there was another – which most certainly didn’t. It wasn’t even an accident. Caroline pushed Lottie’s ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, Charlene, off the top of a roof terrace.

TBH she was being ever so annoying, LOLZ.

But someone else was there too on both occasions.

It’s Caroline’s brother or cousin, depending on whom you believe, and in volume two Virgil is positively ubiquitous.

 

 

 

There’s a very funny recurring joke about Virgil scurrying around on the floor to mop up any spilled coffee as if he’s Caroline’s butler…

“I am not!”

She spills coffee once again; Virgil flashes forward to clean.

Caroline, hand cupped around mouth conspiratorially: “His word against mine”.

… but predominantly Virgil’s ministrations are far more sinister, like dipping into a wallet left in a sports hall’s changing locker to acquire Lottie’s ex-boyfriend’s I.D.

 

 

Lottie’s ex-boyfriend is called Sunny. He’s pretty buff. Lottie’s fashion-friend Meg has a new fiancé called Ashley. He’s pretty brash, boastful, loud and lewd. Fidelity score: 1 of out 10 (if you’re being generous). He’s already brandished his zord in front of Lottie at his and Meg’s engagement party; now he’s quite keen, all sweaty post-squash-match, to show off his zord to Sunny. He snaps a cell-phone photo of the two of them together and posts it so swiftly online that a bewildered Sunny doesn’t even have time to draw breath. He does, however, spot Virgil lurking in the photograph’s background.

Sunny: “Was there a delivery guy in here?”
Ashley: “Why? You expecting a package? …Cuz I got one right here! Haha! It’s huge! C’mon, let’s hit the showers.”

 

 

They get into a rough-and-tumble altercation in the sauna during which both their towels fall off, only interrupted at the last minute by another of Lottie’s obsessive stalkers, a cop.( Let’s not get into any of that, but you could file him under “fashion police”.) Catching his breath, Ashley apologises ever so breezily:

“I’m sorry, dude! No hard feelings, man!”
Hard feelings? What’s up with your zord?!?”

Have you worked out what his zord is yet? It’s standing to attention. I couldn’t possibly publish Ashley’s excuse. Virgil might wish he’d lingered longer, however.

 

 

It’s all so deliciously and comically homoerotic, Leslie Hung proving herself to be a master of both priapic pixilation and but also tight buttocks fully on show. I’d have typed “tight, rosy buttocks” but would have looked far too fixated myself. (I was.)

 

 

The question is this, however: who wants what? Not just in the shower or sauna, but throughout:  who is manipulating whom, why, and to what end? Who is in on it? Who is out of it?

Well, almost all of them if you’re talking about their skulls, drugged up in the desert during the cover’s sapphic photo-shoot.

Again, what I am attempting to convey in this review which only dips its tentative toes into the series’ much more substantial and murky waters is that this is no mere comedy of manners. And hey, I love me a comedy of manners! In such a dexterously performed piece such as this, that would be quite enough to satisfy my soul.

But this is a much more open-air theatre with additional, decidedly closed confines which I suspect will only open up its other stalls when [You’re fired – ed.]

SLH

Buy Snotgirl vol 2: California Screaming and read the Page 45 review here

Wet Moon vol 6: Yesterday’s Gone (New Edition) (£17-99, Oni) by Sophie Campbell.

The darkest hours aren’t necessarily at midnight.

GHOST WORLD for goths with pvc, piercings and hair dye – that’s how WET MOON started out: an empathic exploration of the uneasy friendships between a group of hesitant, second-guessing, slightly paranoid girls at college, and a celebration of their far-from-standard body forms with the silkiest, most tender of art. Over five previous volumes those friendships have expanded and blossomed or withered and died. Some have shared secrets, as do more here.

But all along there were intimations of heart-ache and horror lurking beneath the surface, as if something was simmering in the swamp all around them, and then someone they never noticed stewing within. In WET MOON VOL 5 she finally erupted, her seething psychosis taken out on one of those friends in act of extreme violence which made everyone I know truly wince.

This is the emotional fall-out, and it’s handled with all the depth it deserves.

 

 

So many other creators would have cut all too quickly to the chase – the pursuit of the culprit concerned – but that’s not what happens in real life. Instead they are left dazed, bewildered by a butchery they could never see coming and still, throughout, oblivious to its source. All they care about is their friend. She’s the only person who knows who did it, and I’m afraid she’s deep in a coma.

 

 

Six volumes in, I have to be ever so careful what I say, but I hope I’ve intrigued potential new readers. I love this series so much that I’ve reviewed every volume and this isn’t my best shot, I know.

Everyone handles grief differently, unpredictably, depending on where they are right then in their lives. Sophie Campbell has entirely understood that. Her humanity and sympathy leaps from every page. No one is judged, and as they struggle to console each other whilst needing consolation themselves, we wait for our woman to wake up. Will she?

 

 

“I hate this waiting, Mara. Waiting an’ waiting for somethin’ to happen. Takes so much energy.”

Lots of lingering silence and exceptional use of clothing…

 

 

Once again, this is far from predictable. Not everyone wears their true hearts on their sleeves.

SLH

Buy Wet Moon vol 6: Yesterday’s Gone (New Edition) and read the Page 45 review here

Dark Nights: Metal h/c (£24-99, DC) by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV & Greg Capullo, Mikel Janin, Alvaro Martinez…

“Whoa. Big door. Vic, I’m sending you over the image…”
“Got it, Barry. I’ve run it over a thousand times already. But it keeps coming up unknown…”

Said big door being on the entrance to the hidden bunker in the centre of the huge mountain that has just materialised in the middle of Gotham City… destroying most of the city centre, sky scrapers and all…

Long-time DC fans will immediately recognise it as the base of the Challengers Of The Unknown, who these days work for… ah, well that would be telling. I enjoyed how Snyder weaved in all sorts of DC history into this tale right from the off, be it references to individual bat-books such as BATMAN: THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE written by Grant Morrison, or lesser-used third-string characters like the C.O.T.U.

 

 

It is a bit weird having to remember in this current version of the DC Universe that the Justice League has no idea who the Challengers are yet (Batman aside, obviously, being his usual know-it-all self). I think there was also a very odd, brief-lived, New 52 incarnation involving reality TV ‘stars’ as the Challengers if the memory serves.

Anyway, DC never particularly worried about re-writing their history with the various Crises and other events over the years. There are also a couple of much more familiar characters who crop up in this issue too, who will be very well known to even casual DC readers. If not the Justice League, yet…

 

 

So… following on from events in the Dark Days: The Forge and Dark Days: The Casting one-shots, now collected with a host of relevant reprinted New 52 issues in DARK DAYS: THE ROAD TO METAL, something not so fun and cuddy from… elsewhere… is on the way, apparently being drawn to this reality in some strange way by Bruce Wayne, who could actually do with a good cuddle, so that’s a shame.

There’s a nifty and amusing explanation involving a certain poster of the New 52 Multiverse (also thrown in DARK DAYS: THE ROAD TO METAL as back matter) that probably graced more than a few comic shop walls a few years back which sheds an absence of light on the situation, and that’s probably all I should really say by way of plot explanation at the moment.

I was, and still am, perplexed by the prologue battle that will titillate fans of enormous, transforming Japanese robots… I’m still oblivious as to precisely what wider purpose that served. I commented in my review of the first issue that this event had the potential to get completely preposterous, but hopefully Snyder could keep it on track. He did, just about, but only just.

 

 

There are a few conceits in there that test the old suspense of disbelief, it must be said. It’s certainly big, convoluted, bombastic fun, though, and truly an infinite number of times better than the crisis of writing that was CONVERGENCE. I think I can safely rank this up there with CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS and FINAL CRISIS in pure madcap superhero event enjoyment terms.

Capullo, meanwhile, continues to dish out his impressive linework. He and Snyder, the team primarily responsible for the BATMAN DC NEW 52 run, are excellent foils for each other. If as a writer you are going to try and cram in that much action, you do need someone that can deliver clean, precise mayhem.

JR

Buy Dark Nights: Metal h/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’.

Cloud Hotel (£17-99, Top Shelf) by Julian Hanshaw

The Adventures Of John Blake: Mystery Of The Ghost Ship s/c (£9-99, David Fickling Books) by Philip Pullman & Fred Fordham

Arthur And The Golden Rope s/c (£7-99, Flying Eye Books) by Joe Todd-Stanton

The Heart And The Bottle (£6-99, HarperCollins) by Oliver Jeffers

This Moose Belongs To Me (£6-99, HarperCollins) by Oliver Jeffers

It Will All Hurt (£16-99, Image) by Farel Dalrymple

Rumble vol 4: Soul Without Pity s/c (£14-99, Image) by John Arcudi & David Rubin

The Beauty vol 4 s/c (£14-99, Image) by Jeremy Haun, Jason A. Hurley & Matthew Dow Smith, Thomas Nachlik

Luisa: Now And Then (£22-99, Humanoids) by Carole Maurel, adapated by Mariko Tamaki

Madame Cat (£9-99, Humanoids) by Nancy Pena

Vietnamese Memories Book 1: Leaving Saigon (£14-99, Humanoids) by Clement Baloup

Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories vol 1 s/c (£22-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben, Duncan Fegredo, Mick McMahon, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Dave Stewart, Matt Hollingsworth, James Sinclair, Clem Robins, Pat Brosseau

A Quick & Easy Guide To They / Them Pronouns (£6-99, Limerence Press) by Archie Bongiovanni, Tristan Jimerson

Flash vol 6: Cold Day In Hell s/c (Rebirth) (£14-99, DC) by Joshua Williamson, Michael Moreci & Howard Porter, Scott Kolins, Mick Gray, Pop Mahn, Christian Duce, Scott McDaniel

DC / Young Animal: Milk Wars s/c (£16-99, DC / Young Animals) by Steve Orlando, Gerard Way, Jody Houser, Cecil Castellucci, Jon Rivera, Magdalene Visaggio &  Aco, Ty Templeton, Mirka Andolfo, Langdon Foss, Dale Eaglesham, Nick Derigton, Sonny Liew

Defenders vol 2: Kingpins Of New York s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & David Marquez, Micheal Avon Oeming

Invincible Iron Man: Ironheart vol 2: Choices s/c (£17-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Stefano Caselli, various

Dark Souls Covers Collection (£26-99, Titan) by various

The Beautiful Death h/c (£21-99, Titan) by Mathieu Bablet

Voices Of A Distant Star (£10-99, Vertical) by Makoto Shinkai & Mizu Sahara

 

 

 

Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews June 2018 week one

Wednesday, June 6th, 2018

Featuring Ellen Forney, Karl Marx (!), Friedrich Engels (!!), Martin Rowson (!!!), JH Williams III, Gary Spencer Millidge, Julian Voloj, Thomas Campi, Grant Morrison, Darick Robertson, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Jeffrey Alan Love and so very many more in such a good cause!

Where We Live: A Benefit For The Survivors In Las Vegas s/c (£17-99, Image) by various, edited by JH Williams III…

“Guns are bad. The world is madness. Being a victim sucks. Conspiracy is strangling the truth.
“How am I supposed to poetically dramatize that in a couple of f%@*! comicbook pages?
“And to people who already know this.
“Everyone buying this book is doing it because they feel the same silent rage.
“It’s not like I’m going to shock and surprise them with my unique take!
“Vegas happened because we’ve tilted off our axis. And we all know it. We know!”

That’s Brian Michael Bendis, there. Please don’t worry, Brian, we are just so very, very grateful that there are people as eloquent and caring as you and the other 100+ writers and artists that gave their time and energy to espouse not just what we all know, but what we all feel.

 

Art by Gabriel Rodriguez

 

Before we go any further, let me give thanks by listing them in full, not least because to put them at the top where we normally do would break both our initial blog and the product page itself:

Rafael Albuquerque, Laura Allred, Michael Allred, Paul Azaceta, Henry Barajas, Jennifer Battisti, Brian Michael Bendis, Deron Bennett, Aditya Bidikar, W. Haden Blackman, Jeff Boison, Tyler Boss, Simon Bowland, Ivan Brandon, Bernardo Brice, John Broglia, Giulia Brusco, Ryan Burton, Kurt Busiek, Aaron Campbell, Mike Cavallaro, Craig Cermak, Cliff Chiang, Janice Chiang, Amy Chu, Sal Cipriano, Jeromy Cox, Christopher Crank, Rachel Crosby, Dee Cunniffe, Andrew Dalhouse, Nelson Daniel, Geof Darrow, Al Davison, Kelly Sue DeConnick, J. M. DeMatteis, Will Dennis, Michael J. DiMotta, Gustavo Duarte, Aaron Duran, Joshua Dysart, Pierce Elliott, Joshua Ellis, Mark Englert, Taylor Esposito, Triano Farrell, Lucia Fasano, Ray Fawkes, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Marco Finnegan, Tim Fish, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Tess Fowler, Tom Fowler, Rachael Fulton, Neil Gaiman, Monica Gallagher, Eric Gapstur, Michael Gaydos, Kieron Gillen, Isaac Goodhart, Sina Grace, Brandon Graham, Justin Gray, Stefano Gaudiano, Lela Gwenn, Brian Haberlin, Jason Harris, Matt Hawkins, Ray-Anthony Height, Daniel Hernandez, Talia Hershewe, Phil Hester, David Hine, Joe Illidge, Van Jensen, Jocks, Scott David Johnson, Joëlle Jones, Justin Jordan, Liana Kangas, Jarret Keene, Ryan Kelly, Eric Kim, Neil Kleid, Todd Klein, Dean Kotz, Ariel Kristiana, R. Eric Lieb, Jeff Lemire, Matt Lesniewski, Greg Lockard, Lee Loughridge, Marissa Louise, Andrew MacLean, Ollie Masters, Mariah McCourt, Jamie McKelvie, Mike Mignola, Mark Millar, Gary Spencer Millidge, Fábio Moon, B. Clay Moore, Moritat, Joe Mulvey, Patricia Mulvihill, Andrea Mutti, Chris O’Halloran, Michael Avon Oeming, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Richard Pace, Greg Pak, Alex Paknadel, Chas! Pangburn, Tony Parker, Michael Perlman, Pere Perez, Alex Petretich, Sean Phillips, Curt Pires, Nick Pitarra, Vladimir Popov, Javier Pulido, Cardinal Rae, Christina Rice, Jules Rivera, Darick Robertson, James Robinson, Gabriel Rodriguez, Robert Rose, John Roshell, Chris Ryall, Rafael Scavone, Erica Sthultz, Alex Segura, Kelsey Shannon, Alex Sheikman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Casey Silver, Gail Simone, Damon Smith, Matthew Dow Smith, Taki Soma, Matt Sorvillo, Jason Starr, Cameron Stewart, Dave Stewart, Matt Strackbein, Shaun Steven Struble, Ken Syd, Larime Taylor, Sylv Taylor, Paul Tobin, Noel Tuazon, Bryan Valenza, Geirrod Van Dyke, David Walker, Gabriel Hernández Walta, Malachi Ward, Dustin Weaver, Chris Wildgoose, J. H. Williams III, Kelly Williams, Scott Bryan Wilson, Chris Wisnia, Wendy Wright-Williams, Warren Wucinich

 

Art by Chris Wildgoose

 

In addition, J.H. Williams III (PROMETHEA, SANDMAN OVERTURE), resident of Las Vegas, has acted as the curating editor, which must have been quite the task given that the 75 contributions contained within the covers – the front one featuring a logo which is an inspired reworking of the iconic Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada sign combined with a thought-provoking vista – are an extremely varied mixture of eye-witness accounts brought to harrowing life, plus fictional stories and factual works which hauntingly illustrate this tragic shooting, currently the most deadly in modern US history with 58 fatalities and over 500 injured, and also the wider issues, be that the political football of gun control, comparative global statistics on spree-killers, mental and physical health issues for traumatised survivors, and so much more.

For example, Brian Michael Bendis’s contribution from which the pull quote above is taken (illustrated by Michael Avon Oeming, Taki Soma and lettered by Bernardo Brice), covers his own frustration at wishing he had done more personally to overtly oppose the lack of gun control in the US and his admiration for the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting who are bravely standing up to be counted, and consequently viciously attacked for it by the right-media media, plus clueless vile trolls both online and in the real world.

 

Art by Phil Hester

 

I note for example that the family home of Parkland survivor, and subsequent vocal activist, David Hogg – who has even been accused of being a paid-for actor not even present at the shooting by conspiracy theorists – was recently ‘swatted’. A troubling and highly dangerous new phenomenon whereby someone falsely (and anonymously) reports a serious crime in progress at a particular address hoping that the householders will be hugely inconvenienced, if not indeed fatally shot (as has happened) by the rapid and heavily armed law enforcement response, typically involving SWAT teams, hence the slang term. Fortunately for David and his family, and perhaps not a little ironically, they were in Washington D.C. where David was receiving the Robert F. Kennedy Humanitarian Award. Only in America…

You can do your bit, though, however small that seems, by buying this work as 100% of the net proceeds for the WHERE WE LIVE anthology will be donated to Route 91 Strong, a non-profit organization set up to help survivors of gun violence.

 

Art by Gary Spencer Millidge

 

It is such a diverse selection that it is tricky to put forward a favourite, if that’s the right word to use concerning such material, but Gary STRANGEHAVEN Spencer Millidge’s ‘The Watershed’, really stuck with me. It features a gun-toting action film hero plucked from the big screen to be educated by the ghost of a young girl about the recent history of mass shootings, both in the US and worldwide, including Dunblaine in Scotland, and the widely varying governmental responses and consequent statistical results.

 

Art by Gary Spencer Millidge

 

It also finishes with a couple of very salient observations concerning the Second Amendment, including that the arms which citizens should have the right to bare were of entirely lesser orders of magnitude in terms of killing power when it was originally written. The readily available precision-made modern assault rifle, replete with targeting scopes and bumpstocks for firing up to 120 rounds per minute, bares absolutely no comparison with a muzzle-loaded single-shot ‘long arm’ rifle. Thus, surely, the Second Amendment should be errr… amended?

One day, maybe…

 

Art by Michael Gaydos

 

Actually, just putting my future hat on again, and stepping into 2000AD-esque territory for a minute, what might hopefully ultimately make lethal weaponry irrelevant – aside from better mental health services, improved background checks on people wanting to buy guns, and if we can get carried away for a moment, the demise of the military-industrial complex – is improved non-lethal weaponry.

If cops could actually take down criminals in any and every given situation without needing to employ lethal force, be that through disorientating sonic weapons, ultra-fast acting sedative darts or indeed instantly hardening riot foam or some other crazy futuristic devices, then there is no  excuse whatsoever for private individuals to legally have lethal weapons. Tasers are a start, clearly, but it seems like police, some poorly trained American ones certainly, just think they are there to be used on unarmed people to execute a quick arrest, rather than actually trying to talk to people and understand what the problem is. So true, effective, 100% safe, non-lethal weaponry, meaning guns can be dispensed with by everyone, including the majority of law enforcement – given a certain other burning issue of the day in the US currently – would be a good and helpful thing.

 

Art by Aaron Campbell

 

As I say, one day maybe… Not so fussed about having Judges passing instant sentences and dispensing <ahem> righteous justice, though. But surely at some point, common sense in the US will begin to prevail amongst the majority of the population, even if it takes another generation or two, and then gun crime statistics and spree killings may finally begin to decrease.

JR

Buy Where We Live: A Benefit For The Survivors In Las Vegas s/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Artist Behind Superman – The Joe Schuster Story s/c (£17-99, Super Genius) by Julian Voloj & Thomas Campi…

“You look like you haven’t eaten in days.”
“Ah…”
“No worries. My treat.”
“Maybe some soup?”
“Soup it is. What didya do for a living?”
“I did comics.”
“Oh nice. Anything I would know?”
“Well…”

Our opening prologue commences on a beautiful sunny day in a tree-lined park in Queens, New York, in 1975. An elderly man sleeping rough on a bench is taken by a kindly young cop to have some much needed breakfast, only to find to his surprise that he’s eating with one of the creators of Superman. The cop is obviously puzzled as to how Joe Schuster could have possibly ended up like this and when he asks him the question our story proper begins, narrated in the first person, with a subtle shift to a more period art style, right back to when Joe was a lad.

 

 

 

In fact, this starts slightly beforehand as we get the story of how Joe’s mother moved to North America from Russia with her sister. Along the way in Rotterdam they fell in love with the Russian Jewish owners’ sons of the hotel they were staying in and got married, before all heading off to Toronto together. Eventually, Joe and his mother and father would end up in Cleveland, which is where Joe would meet Jerry Siegel at Alexander Hamilton Junior High School where both were contributors to the school paper, The Federalist.

The two chums hit it off instantly and were soon collaborating on stories for the paper, before beginning to dream of finding a wider syndicated circulation for their creations. After some initial trial and error, both in terms of content and carrier, their fledging Superman character was snapped up by Nicholson Publications for inclusion in their Action Comics publication.

 

 

This was when Joe and Jerry made their fatal mistake by signing a contract which waived all future rights to the Superman character in exchange for a cheque for $130. A cheque which had the ignominy of both their names being spelt incorrectly, ensuring much embarrassment at the bank when they went to cash it. That contract proved to be an extremely costly error which haunted Siegel and Schuster for the rest of their lives.

The subsequent chapters of this fascinating work shows their toiling endeavours to eke out a living in the industry, firstly working on ACTION COMICS and SUPERMAN, all the whilst mentally calculating and crucifying themselves over how much the publishers were creaming in, and their unsuccessful efforts to create another winner. Plus, every time another piece of merchandise appeared, or the 1950s TV adaptation and finally the smash 1978 film starring Christopher Reeves, it was like another hammer blow to their hearts and indeed, mental well being.

 

 

Eventually a compromise deal was reached, which provided them with a very belated stipend and credit for their creation, but it took a lot of pressure from within the industry, led by Neal Adams, to make it happen and even then, it was little more than a token nod from Warner Brothers, nervous that the bad press whipped up might affect box-office takings.

If you’re a true fan of comics and are aware of some of the various injustices perpetuated on creators by publishers over the years (and I note with some interest that the name DC Comics never actually appears anywhere in this work, presumably to avoid any litigious issues), you’ll find this a heartbreaking if informative and entertaining read.

 

 

Art-wise, the watercolour style palette and illustrative style reminded me rather of some Kyle Baker, but generally it provides the perfect historical feel for the work. The lack of pencils neatly and dreamily captures the sense of bygone days and a mythical American golden era. When the art shifts back to the pencilled, slightly more focussed style, in the mid-seventies for the wrap-up pages, it only serves as a further jarring reminder that for Siegel and Schuster, their creation, so universally beloved by the public, had been little more than a waking nightmare for them their entire careers, a ubiquitous omnipresent reminder of their youthful moment of naivety.

JR

Buy The Artist Behind Superman – The Joe Schuster Story s/c and read the Page 45 review here

The Communist Manifesto (£12-99, SelfMadeHero) by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels & Martin Rowson…

“In this sense, the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence…

… abolition of private property!”

Thereafter follows an intense Q&A discussion with the crowd at the Boojie Nights Kapitalist Komedy Club Open Mic Nite as Karl Marx performs his routine for the assembled Proletariat and Bourgeoisie. This particular line, as you perhaps might expect, provokes a disgruntled reaction from both sides of the crowd as rich and poor alike attempt to justify the continued existence of private property whilst Karl counters their arguments.

The thorny issue of private property, particularly land or dwellings, is something I have pondered myself before, but whilst envisaging a Star Trek-esque future where humankind has hopefully evolved past money completely. Presumably because automation of work has forced us all onto the dole to start with, but then assuming we manage to achieve some sort of utopia where there is a plentiful surplus supply of food and energy for all (through nuclear fission, I would imagine), hopefully currencies will subsequently experience the ultimate devaluation.

 

 

3D printers (basically replicators!) should mean people can produce pretty much anything they need, or indeed want, on the spot. All that would remain for debate in this new world… is who gets to live where… In this glorious new age of equality, if no one has to work, surely everyone is going to want the best weather and views? Unless the private ownership of all land and dwellings is removed and the right to live somewhere decided entirely at random, and perhaps not in perpetuity, people who owned said land are going to want to live on it. Or indeed charge someone else for the privilege. Hmm…

Of course, where the utopian Star-Trek model I referred to earlier will go totally tits up is when the ultra-rich start to hoard life-extending technology at the expense of everyone else, if they haven’t already… Currently they spend their money on maintaining their outward appearances, but once the process of avoiding errors creeping into RNA replication is cracked, near-immortality beckons, and do you seriously believe that will be shared with everyone? Apologies if you have heard me rant on about this before.

 

 

No, of course not, and the excuse will be that the limited resources of our planet couldn’t possibly sustain everybody suddenly not dying. Which is a fair point actually. So, probably the best for all concerned, which is what they will tell us, is if the great and good, the leaders of men, keep said technology for themselves (see LAZARUS), to help humankind steer the tricky course out to colonising the stars. And presumably exporting rapacious capitalism to the rest of the solar system and beyond…

You can make the case, despite Martin Rowson’s assertions in his foreword that at one point in time since Marx’s death in 1883 nearly “half of humanity would be governed nominally according to the ideas and aspirations originally expounded in The Communist Manifesto…” and that “…in the 21st century over a fifth of us, for good or ill, would be still.” that true Communism, in its purest sense as envisaged in this manifesto, has never been practiced. I would personally concur with that, because to my mind, until we have limitless energy, and by extension, thus an abundance of resources of all kinds, and thus need and want are completely eliminated, we can’t evolve past Capitalism. Of course, we should still try to be kind to everyone and practice compassion in the meanwhile. Which could very easily lead me on to a discussion regarding the Venn diagram of Buddhism and Communism, but that’s for another time…

 

 

Wonder what Karl Marx and Engels would have had to say about all that down the pub…? Which is actually where they spent most of their time fomenting and indeed fermenting this document that upon its completion, sat virtually ignored for thirty years, before being rediscovered and championed as a blueprint for egality.

Also, what would Martin Rowson say? I’d be very interested in hearing that actually. He’s done an excellent job adapting what is, in essence, a very dry polemic, for entertainment as well as our education. Marx is our ever-ebullient narrator figuratively and quite literally walking us through numerous full-page spreads with his exuberant overlaid exhortations, along with a handful of more discursive pages of panelled comics, such as in the Komedy Club, when Marx needs an audience to further his lecture. Overall, partly due to Rowson’s choice of spidery handwritten lettering, seemingly done with a quill, it has the feel of an extended political cartoon. Which isn’t remotely surprising, given he’s an editorial cartoonist by trade.

 

 

I think this is a very worthy adaptation, purely because anything which further disseminates important ideas to a hopefully new, as well as knowing and already appreciative audience, in such a satirically amusing manner, is a good thing. As would be pure Communism, if we ever get there.

JR

Buy The Communist Manifesto and read the Page 45 review here

Rock Steady – Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life (£16-99, Fantagraphics) by Ellen Forney…

“How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Things are just… overwhelming.”

Following on from her MARBLES: MANIA, DEPRESSION, MICHAELANGELO & ME in which she talked about her experiences with mental illness with remarkable candour, Ellen Forney returns, this time with the aim of providing fellow suffers with an insight into her own personal blueprint for surviving, indeed thriving, in the face of such adversity.

We still get some revealing personal anecdotes in comics form to help illustrate a pertinent painful point or two, often surprisingly humorous in nature, but the accompanying primary body of material here is squarely aimed at directly helping people through analysing Ellen’s own experiences and what has, and hasn’t, worked for her.

Thus, with chapters on therapy, coping tools and strategies, dealing with insomnia, medication, warning signs, where to engage with like-minded people and book-ending chapters covering the basics and some general encouragement, this is effectively Ellen’s own survival guide to Bipolar Disorder, though as she comments in the first chapter, it is also relevant for any mood disturbance.

The physiological wheres and whyfores surrounding the causes of such issues are dealt with just as clearly here as in Steve Haines’ and Sophie Standing’s excellent ANXIETY IS REALLY STRANGE. But where ROCK STEADY really comes into its own is in the practical, often hard-won, insight and advice Ellen is then able to offer on the various topics mentioned above. It’s extensive in scope, and should provide a useful toolkit for anyone needing to tinker under their own proverbial hoods, either independently or under the guidance of an appropriate medical professional – something which Ellen also touches on.

I would heartily concur that, as the sub-title proclaims, this advice is indeed brilliant.

I think that knowing one isn’t alone is an important part of having the confidence to try and deal with one’s mental suffering. Yes, it can be incredibly difficult to even conceive of trying to open up and look forward, go deeper into one’s problems, instead of turning away and hiding from them, but knowing that other people have been where you have been before, and managed to progress towards a degree of stability, is an immensely important fillip. There is indeed an entire chapter devoted to that subject. The whole book will form another very valuable part of the ever burgeoning canon of comics and graphic novels dedicated to helping educate about and support our mental health.

Into Page 45’s Mental Health Section this, therefore, goes.

JR

Buy Rock Steady – Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life and read the Page 45 review here

Happy s/c (£9-99, Image) by Grant Morrison & Darick Robertson.

“AS SEEN ON TV!” as hastily repackaged collections are so quick to squeal.

But hey, the middle-aged bloke who served me at Sainsbury’s had seen the series, taken note that it was based on a comic, and he knew who’d written it. Never read a comic before in his adult life. That’s pretty cool, so however shall I sell it to you…?

Profanity, hot bullets and blue Brony action!

Many sarcastic thanks to whichever of my sympathisers on Twitter explained the term ‘Brony’ to me before the launch of MY LITTLE PONY comics, following a flock of five adult fellows in a single swoop pre-ordering the MY LITTLE PONY #1 COMPLETE BOXED SET at £18-99 each. I cannot unlearn what I now know to be true, so I may never fully recover. What I learned was this:

There has been a surge of what could loosely be called man-love for that saccharine pink pony, and those enjoying such a wayward cultural misalignment are called Bronies. Now, I’m hardly the butchest boy in the box and obviously Page 45 is an all-inclusive, non-judgemental love-in for all manner of diverse penchants and pleasures… but there are fucking limits.

 

 

By which I mean: “That’ll be £18-99, please. Thank you very much! You are so loved!”

And honestly, you are.

I’m just being cheap and I deserve any / all flack that I get.

But how could this possibly be of any relevance to a Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson comic?

 

 

Well, Happy here is a feathered blue pony with big, bulbous, bright shiny eyes, a purple unicorn horn and accentuated, goofy front teeth. Knowing Grant Morrison you may seriously doubt this, but potentially he’s the product of a delirious imagination as ex-Detective Nick Sax is sped across town in an ambulance after receiving several gunshot wounds in part-exchange for having murdered the four Fratelli brothers. They thought they were on a mission to axe our Sax, but it was no-nonsense Nick who hired them in the first place. The police are swift to the scene but that’s good news for no one except the Fratellis’ Uncle Stefano who’s determined to keep it all in the family – “it” being the Fratelli fortune. Unfortunately no one bothered to tell him the password and the only person still alive who knows that now is Nick. 

Corruption is the order of the day on the snowy streets of God Only Knows and torture/interrogation will follow, all kindly overseen and endorsed by New Jersey’s Finest in the form of Maireadh McCarthy who’s firmly in Uncle Stefano’s pockets. Time to send in arch-information extractor Mr. Smoothie:

“I feel like the ghost of a hard-on that will not die.”

 

 

Along the way we meet a drunken paedophile dressed up as Santa (you’ll meet him again – and, after Nick knows where, you’ll know when), while Sax quite casually and coincidentally dispatches a serial murderer in a prawn costume smoking a spliff from a back end of a hammer which was five seconds away from coming down on the head of a prostitute blowing him to blissful oblivion. Did I mention it’s Christmas?

From the writer of WE3, NAMELESS, JOE THE BARBARIAN, THE INVISIBLES and DOOM PATROL etc. comes something akin to THE FILTH only without the giant, flying spermatozoa. Profanity abounds and he’s set out to sully the holiday season whilst lobbing in the incongruity of bright-eyed chirpy-pants Happy The Horse who claims to be Hailey’s imaginary friend sent to Sax to rescue her from the plastered paedo. 

 

 

TRANSMETROPOLITAN’s Darick Robertson is on his best form ever with masterfully slick choreography, the sturdiest of figure work and eye-popping street scenes all beautifully lit and then coloured to perfection by Richard P. Clark.

SLH

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

Fantastic Four: Epic Collection vol 2 – The Master Plan Of Doctor Doom s/c (£35-99, Marvel) by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby.

Welcome back to sixteen more issues of very weird science!

See the Fantastic Four fly the Fantasti-car without first deciding on a designated driver… straight into a giant milk bottle!

Gasp as Mr. Fantastic stretches high in the sky to pluck a couple of missiles off the bottom of a fighter plane going at, oh I don’t know, a thousand miles an hour!! He doesn’t even have to unlock them!

Laugh as poor Johnny – the Human Torch whose flame can melt through rock and metal – is put out by a single vase of water!

“Put out of action by a plant pot!” he gasps.

It’s a vase, you dimwit.

“I’ll never live it down!” he wails. And he won’t.

 

It really *is* a vase.

 

It’s key material, with all the regulars from The Mole Man, Doctor Doom and Diablo to Namor the Submariner making another of his oh so many seductive moves on Susan Storm. You may want to read about his first foray in FANTASTIC FOUR EPIC COLLECTION VOL 1 during which I had a field day because, honestly, distil their origin:

Saying “No, sir!” to NASA, four thieves steal a space rocket, and strangely we applaud.

 

And I really *wasn’t* making that up.

 

The X-Men guest-star as does Dr. Strange, and even Nick Fury in what might be his first appearance as Colonel as opposed to Sergeant. He’s working for the C.I.A. rather than S.H.I.E.L.D. which hadn’t yet formed, and is mightily concerned about America’s investment in San Gusto, a “showplace of democracy” surrounded by commies into which the US has sunk billions. Apparently the citizens are revolting, so Fury enlists the Fantastic Four’s aid to interfere with yet another nation’s affairs because, as he so righteously pronounces, “We couldn’t interfere in another nation’s affairs!”

Not until the C.I.A. or George Bush Jr. told him to, anyway.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that this is all the result of the Hate Monger who has set up shop in San Gusto before travelling to New York to spread his racial hatred in mass rallies that incite the crowd to violence. This was Stan Lee’s first full issue tackling that most “un-American” of American sentiments upon which the country was virtually founded and which it has systematically practised or endorsed ever since (in an overt nod to the KKK, the Hate Monger is wearing a purple version of their cowardly cowl).

 

 

[Oh dear god, I wrote all of the above, verbatim, over a decade ago, and now we have Donald Trump as American President, praising white supremacists as “fine people”, while Nazi swastikas were ignited, just the other night, in Georgia without any arrests that I’m aware of.]

Lee is, of course, to be unequivocally commended for this first and his future attempts to liberate his readers from the predominant social attitudes around them by having his heroes vocally reject racism for the poison that it is, as he went on to do in AVENGERS EPIC VOL 2. It’s just a shame that it had to involve a fictional hypnotic Hate Ray, for the human race is perfectly capable of being swept away by the likes of Moseley, Trump and Hitler, the BNP, UKIP and the British Tory Party as it stands, without anything more conducive to racism than its own ignorance, ill-founded fear and desperate desire for conformity.

Where Stan Lee hasn’t yet seen the light, however, is with Women’s Lib. For although for the first time here Sue Storm begins to discover and experiment with turning objects other than herself invisible and utilising an extended invisible force field, she is overwhelmingly still in thrall to wigs and dresses and, well…

“You know, Reed, this measuring device to test my invisibility would make the kookiest hat!”
“Just as I thought! You have greater powers of vapidity than you suspect, Sue!”

Sorry, what he actually says is “invisibility” not “vapidity”, although you can see what he’s thinking. In fact you can read what he’s thinking half a dozen pages later when he snaps at his go-to girlfriend:

“Just like a woman!! Everything I do is for your own good, but you’re too scatterbrained to realise it!”

 

Hmmm…

But wait, perhaps Stan is having a go at the dismissive male by condemning him, Jane Austen-stylee, through words from his own mouth?! Ummm… no.

“That man!!” she seethes. “I know he’s right… and that’s why I’m angry!”

The undoubted highlight, however, is when the Hulk hits New York in a rage of rejected jealousy when he discovers a newspaper clipping Dr. Bob Banner has left crumpled in his giant purple pants: news that The Avengers have replaced him with Captain America for whom he’s been forsaken by BFF Rick Jones. If memory serves, the Hulk had actually told The Avengers to fuck off in no uncertain terms, but that Rick thing’s sure gotta sting.

Unfortunately The Avengers are hunting the Hulk down in New Mexico, and as the Hulk hits town (and the town’s subway system, its subway trains, its skyscrapers, its news vendors, water hydrants and anything else that gets in his way) Reed Richards succumbs to a bout of man-flu. Neither the Human Torch nor the Invisible Girl survive long under the viridian vandal’s relentless assault, so the way is paved for the biggest one-on-one slug-athon so far to determine the answer to that immortalised question:

“Who is stronger, the Thing or The Hulk?”

 

 

 

 

And it is truly epic. There’s a speedboat chase, a battle on top of the Washington Bridge, plus buses, buildings and electric cables all play their part as improvised hand-weapons while Ben Grimm (The Thing) valiantly soldiers on well into the second issue without a hope in hell of winning. It is, however, when The Avengers finally show up… that they get in each others’ way. Of course they do!

Except Captain America who’s smart on tactics, quick on his wits and, unlike the pill-popping Ant-Man / Giant Man / Amazing Identity Crisis Man, totally drug-free. Here’s the Hulk:

“Try to lecture me will ya?? I’ll — Hey!! How can you move so fast??”
“Clean livin’ does it, Sonny!”

Yes, the Captain is Straight Edge!

I was so impressed with that pronouncement aged 6 that I used it everywhere: in the playground, right round The Rough with my mates… even when my Mum wondered how I could possibly eat so much ice-cream: “Clean livin’ does it, Sonny!”

 

 

Better still is the cover to that second issue (#26) set high on a nascent skyscraper’s skeletal girders, the Hulk at its apex and Rick holding on precariously to a corner, while all nine of our colourful combatants fly or climb towards them both. Structurally, it is magnificent, Giant Man no more than twice the size of the others for fear of tipping the balance of the composition too far in his favour and destroying the framing rhomboid which moves your eye around the piece in exactly the same way as the most famous of Caravaggio’s three ‘David With The Head Of Goliath’ paintings.

I’m not making this shit up.

Nor for once am I making this up when the raging hormone that is Johnny Storm, zapped by the Hate Ray mentioned earlier, gets his emotions confused after his sister Sue Storm douses his flame:

“Try that again, and I’ll forget you’re my sister — which would be a pleasure!

Johnny!

Bonus Jack Kirby cover / Caravaggio comparison point:

 

 

Follow the Torch’s fiery trail from left to right, then right to left as he turns towards the Hulk; your eye then moves a little further along the girder the Hulk’s holding up before dropping down towards Rick Jones then further left along the girder falling diagonally towards the street; finally Thor completes the loop as your eye moves back towards the Torch’s trail and the artfully placed yellow-on-green caption at the bottom. Repeat: you won’t be able to help yourself.

With Caravaggio, it’s not quite a rhombus but certainly a right-angled quadrilateral similarly pitched. Follow the slant of the left-hand side of David’s head down to his shoulder and thence through the shadow to the shine of the sword at its hilt; then down the length of the sword, tellingly, to the crotch; up and to the right is the object of his victory and desire, Goliath’s head, then the shape is completed back up to the head via the length of the boy’s visible, outstretched arm.

 

Yes, it’s that old chestnut.

 

You’re welcome.

Contains FANTASTIC FOUR #19-32 and Annual 1-2

SLH

Buy Fantastic Four: Epic Collection vol 2 – The Master Plan Of Doctor Doom s/c and read the Page 45 review here

Norse Myths – Tales Of Odin, Thor And Loki h/c (£18-99, Walker Studio) by Kevin Crossley-Holland & Jeffrey Alan Love.

“Kevin Crossley-Holland is the master.”

 – Neil Gaiman

I don’t have any evaluation for you here, so sorry, because it’s illustrated prose, and I’m currently addicted to Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Homo Deus’, his sequel to ‘Sapiens’ which was so stunning that I read it twice, back-to-back in order to assimilate its revelations. Eloquent and entertaining, the books thoroughly and thoughtfully contextualise the history (then potential trajectory) of human life over the last 70,000 years ever since our Cognitive Revolution. Expect to be mind-blown every other page.

We can order prose in for you too, if you like. It’s as easy as pie, and all available within the week as one-off requests or to pop in your Page 45 Standing Orders.

Anyway, every spread here is strikingly illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love and if today’s Young Adults are anything like me, they’ll still be lapping up epic mythologies. The photos I have for you are Love’s own from home, taken from Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

While reminding you of what Neil ‘Norse Mythology’ Himself wrote, above, here’s the publisher instead:

“An extraordinary and enthralling illustrated anthology of Norse Myths from a Carnegie-Medal winning author. The gods of the Vikings come to life as never before in this extraordinary illustrated anthology by Carnegie Medal-winning author Kevin Crossley-Holland and artist Jeffrey Alan Love. These dramatic, enthralling and atmospheric tales are based on the Scandinavian myth cycle – one of the greatest and most culturally significant stories in the world – and tell of Odin with his one eye, Thor with his mighty hammer and Loki, the red-haired, shape-shifting trickster.

“In this stunning collection of myths, the strange world of ancient magic, giants, dwarfs and monsters is unforgettably imagined.”

SLH

Buy Norse Myths – Tales Of Odin, Thor And Loki h/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’.

About Betty’s Boob h/c (£26-99, Archaia) by Vero Cazot & Julie Rocheleau

The City On The Other Side (£12-99, FirstSecond) by Mairghread Scott & Robin Robinson

The Day The Crayons Quit s/c (£7-99, Harper Collins) by Drew Daywalt & Oliver Jeffers

The Day The Crayons Came Home s/c (£7-99, Harper Collins) by Drew Daywalt & Oliver Jeffers

Gumballs s/c (£17-99, Top Shelf) by Erin Nations

Hellboy And The BPRD – 1955 (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson & Shawn Martinbrough, Brian Churilla, Paolo Rivera

John Carpenter’s Tales Of Science Fiction – Vault (£8-99, Storm King Productions) by James Ninness & Andres Esparza

Tomorrow (£7-99, BHP Comics) by Jack Lothian & Garry Mac

Wet Moon vol 6: Yesterday’s Gone (New Edition) (£17-99, Oni) by Sophie Campbell

Dark Nights: Metal h/c (£24-99, DC) by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV & Greg Capullo, Mikel Janin, Alvaro Martinez

Hal Jordan And The Green Lantern Corps vol 5: Twilight Of The Guardians s/c (Rebirth) (£14-99, DC) by Robert Venditti & Patrick Zircher, various

Tales Of Suspense: Hawkeye And The Winter Soldier s/c (£14-50, Marvel) by Matthew Rosenberg & Travel Foreman

Mouse Guard: Autumn 1152 h/c (US Edition) (£18-99, Archaia) by David Petersen

Battle Angel Alita – Mars Chronicle vol 3 (£9-99, Kodansha) by Yukito Kishiro