Page 45 Review by Stephen
Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month July 2025
Nicholas Woodhead has won me over in every way: he has something to say and loves to play - with words, images, formats, compositions, and preconceptions - mischievously mixing it up, for example, to pluck a grand silver lining from the toxic clouds of social inequality, criminal injustice and climate catastrophe in his ultra-succinct NOTHING BUT OPTIMISM ABOUT WHAT'S COMING. It's like an Adam Curtis documentary compressed to 3 pithily scathing minutes veined with charcoal-black humour - so deftly done.
But it's the range and versatility of Woodhead's wit I want to promote and encourage, so we've collected 4 of his current comics - the above, WET NURSE #1 and #0, plus FATALLY-ILL ASTRONAUT FUNNIES - into a Page 45 CBOTM package.
He's my fav self-publishing find since Joe Decie - and there is indeed the same sort twinkle when looking through his autobiographical eye, the framing of each panel is just as robust, and the lettering's lovely to boot.
FATALLY-ILL ASTRONAUT FUNNIES is a staple-free, fold-out farce in which an astronaut stranded at least two weeks away in space... is reminded that he has only one week's supply of oxygen, but not to worry because his blood tests came back and he'll be dead in a few days anyway.
"Sigh."
There's so much semi-stoical sighing - punctuating 5 of the 7 instalments wherein an improbable legacy is created over through misconception (a la De Crecy's GLACIAL PERIOD) - that I was put wistfully in mind of Lizz Lunney's Depressed Cat.
Woodhead does feline funny too, but confounds expectations of what constitutes a cat comic, for as Jeffrey Brown eschewed the cute for the truth, and Jamie Smart's LOOSHKIN brought self-absorbed, oblivious, bright blue terrorism to kids' comics, so Woodhead's one-sided relationship with his serial-killer cat called Kirby gives us dead-pan dour instead. It's not nonchalance; its indifference, implacability and very, very funny. Sprinkled between these in WET NURSE #1 come medical matters, musings on mortality (guerrilla aftermath activity), a mercy killing and much on Mary Magdalene. Oh, and an unusually empathic answer to assault-by-zombie.
