Page 45 Review by Stephen
Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month March 2026
Excerpt from The Carny Code:
Don't nose into anyone else's business
Don't screw up anyone else's game
Don't give 'em your real name
If, that is, you even know it. Like a winter fog, mystery and intrigue permeate every track and canvas flap of this travelling circus. So many questions and a fair few sleights of hand - even some sabotage! Then there's the equally elusive question of 'Romo', their mute so-called WolfBoy whose past flights and frights flash no more than momentarily before his mind's eye. How much will be revealed by this performance's end?
But let's be clear why you're here: ROMO is like nothing I've clocked eyes on in comics! A cursory comparison could be Posy Simmonds's TAMARA DREWE for composition-with-text and the countryside, but that's contemporary and most middle-class. This is like a vagrant's tour over dales, under bridges and across dairy pastures many moons ago. It is a heavenly parade of spectacle as the caravans circle, the circus tent's hauled heavenwards and they travel to town to broadcast their arrival. It's more like a melee at times (it would be if one voice had its way), and I love the way that our performers are picked out from the crowds by colour, and the use of light at night, torches flaming gold against the predominant blue.
The choreography is impeccable as the clowns abound, the trapeze swings with ease and a musician beats on his big bass drum. There's nothing like pencil lines for loose, flowing movement. And then (again) there's Romo himself, as lithe as you like, perching, pouncing, giggling and frowning, for he spots more than most, even if he doesn't quite understand what's going on.
Targeted at early teens, I know that they won't have seen anything like this before - not the content and certainly not the insane energy level and if it is, for us, a tad over-wordy when we wanted to race on, that smacks more of a creator firing on 5 million billion cylinders, releasing everything boiling and roiling inside them before they burst.
And no one wants bits of burst creator congealing on their kitchen walls.
