Even with eyes set firmly in the shadow of one's critical cap it's impossible not to mine redeeming elements in every work of an anthology produced with charitable intent, and so it is with this uneven-but-worthy comics collection – all proceeds from the sale of Sorry I Can't Take Your Call Right Now But I'm Off Saving The World are destined for Goal. Delivering work inspired by this title-trigger – the answering machine message of editor Cliodhna Lyons' late father when working abroad with aid organisations – the anthology offers a diversity of styles and subject matters.
Featuring the 1- to 8-page works of 30 creators, this attractive, polished volume delivers a veritable mix-bag of penny chews, with some chews inevitably tastier than others. Cricket In A Bag, by Catherine and Tomm More, briefly explores the impact volunteers in Kenya have on rescued street children, to uplifting consequence. In sedate parable Planting Christopher and Ellen Ruggia touch on personal responsibility via a horticulturist who understands the conditions of the world and who has found her own tranquillity and order. Malte Knaack's The Visit moodily evokes the absence of closure in a broken relationship as exes spend a listless weekend together. 1963 pastiche The Living Proton, by Gar Shanley and Cathal Duggan, is an adroitly realised sci-fi superhero parody wherein our hero does battle in a quantum world's haberdashery realm. And in Jenny Linn-Cole's cosmic allegory Dog Man Saves The World three lolloping mutts have their delightful way with a familiar globe.
Also in the creator-mix are the chewy Joe Decie, Sarah McIntyre, Lee Thacker, John Maybury, Philip Barrett and others (including me; as masticatory as they come). And though much of the material is superfluous to the spirit of a title poignantly personalised by Cliodhna Lyons – and not intended to stretch the limits of creative endeavour – there is conscientiously crafted work on offer, diverting-enough to satisfy the undemanding reader, and gathered and bound into an uncommon publication with intent substantial-enough to eschew the dampening appraisal of criticism. Recommended.
96 A5 pages, £5.50 / €7 – available from http://www.goalanthology.com/
Given to mood swings of elation and depression, young Dylan Wilson displays no ambition to establish a foot-hold in society despite his mother's encouragement. But Margaret has seen the difference in her son since the arrival of third year cultural studies student Hannah. Unfortunately, this beautiful lodger is not interested, and Dylan's obsession with his recently discovered copy of Seventh World War Comics deepens. The giant globe has been blown off the Earth Corporation's headquarters; the Eight Guardians of Life and Civilisation need to choose a new band of Cosmic Crusaders to fight in the eternal war between good and evil; an Angel is sent to earth to call the new team. There comes a sharp knock on Dylan Wilson's front door, but why bother to do anything? The working classes are being mentally prepared to accept a war that has been made up by a Prime Minister full of zap words and a catchy turn of phrase. Surely this was how Capitalism worked: packaging things to make you want to buy them. Isn't the world in a terrible enough state?
Malleable courtesy of its non-linear time structure, the Slow Science Fictions series firmly positions 2001 story Fanzine Fiction into its loose continuity. No isolated vignette – indeed, the original publication proved of seminal significance – it is reproduced here with a contextualised introduction (which resonates with the series' dream-logic illeism) that nudges the story onto the tracks of author Michael J Weller's personal pilgrimage into the analogous Wellerverse, adding further to its emotional truth. Written with comic strip vocabularies and visual codes an ingrained characteristic, Slow Science Fictions #18 in part examines the metaphysical bubble, subjective existence and universal foibles of the power-fantasy fan, of the escapist and the fantasist; and to borrow from Oscar Wilde, uncovers the mask behind the man. But whether dreams feed our courage to carry off ordinary, everyday challenges, or convince us to sidestep them, SSF #18 is a thoroughly fun read that will have comics-readers, particularly, smiling from start to finish.
40 A5 pages, £2 inc p&p, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ, or pick up a copy at the London Underground Comics stall in Camden market. E-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: http://www.homebakedbooks.co.uk/wellerverse.htm
Additional 3World in 4Time comix, pics, videos, and comments: www.4time.wordpress.com, www.earthco.wordpress.com, www.blog2blog.wordpress.com, www.addingcombe.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com/mickweller, www.egnep.blogspot.com
Social Reality Earthtime 1938: top-level demons and monsters of superhuman power are using Hitler and the axis powers to destroy Christian civilisation with a planned thousand-year Third Reich of militarised paganism. Satan's Spiritual Director on Earth – Sir Michaeal Spearate – sculpts with living flesh (using the blood of dead Jews) and emits a sick and unspeakable goat-fish smell of sixteenth-century Billingsgate as he recruits crop-haired youths with the promise of immortality – jobs for life; and beyond! But Sir Michaeal's enemy, the Nobodaddy (aka God Almighty), sends a beautiful Angel to earth to contact the Cosmic Crusaders – Heaven is at war with Satan, and they are to plan the logistics of defence in the known world.
"You will have no memory of this," says Professor Fergus McQuigley to the Cosmic Crusaders, "but it will be written in your unconscious mind for you to recall in years to come." Similar could be said of Michael J Weller's Slow Science Fictions series as its non-linear saga often lodges shapeless-as-memory in the brain. However, here in #17 the story From Eduard Mogilowski's Old Typewriter (Mogilowski: the series' pulp magazine writer, character and creator of The Cosmic Crusaders) provides a focus more in keeping with conventional narrative-models, and offers immediate satisfaction. With echoes of Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Hellboy, it's an entertaining read; one possessed of a worldly and otherworldly eruditeness.
40 A5 pages, £2 inc p&p, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ, or pick up a copy at the London Underground Comics stall in Camden market. E-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: http://www.homebakedbooks.co.uk/wellerverse.htm
Additional 3World in 4Time comix, pics, videos, and comments: www.4time.wordpress.com, www.earthco.wordpress.com, www.blog2blog.wordpress.com, www.addingcombe.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com/mickweller, www.egnep.blogspot.com
A facetious mosaic of lives entangled in the environment of drugs smuggling, Jason Wilson's Him And Her's Smuggling Vacation chronicles the seemingly ill-fated attempts of a bickering couple of opportunistic Brits to transport a tonne of found-cannabis from Spain to England and dodge both gangsters and customs in the process. With a title that combines an Americanism with the idiosyncratic grammar of a British colloquialism, and with a storyline that echoes English sit-com double-length specials (when, more often than not, characters are sent abroad for exotic intrigue) but told in the European style of humour cartooning, this attractive volume inevitably struggles to find a fitting tone, though is possessed of a gleeful energy.
The writing, at times, lacks guile – clunkily omniscient captions prove particularly off-putting – but the story is structurally sound-enough to withstand frequent interruptions to suspense by inane dialogue, and relief from a script that struggles to be funny is offered by pockets of sober insights and facts on the smuggling business – fuelled by crime consultant to the book, Tony Spencer. Ironically, this absence of laughs is accentuated by quality humour cartooning that outperforms the script and raises expectations. Smuggling Vacation, then, offers a decent story impressively illustrated but encumbered with a gag-deficient humour. Best light-up for this one. (Demotivational Syndrome, anyway, otherwise requires years of dispiriting toil to develop!)
80 full-colour A4 pages for £7.98. Check availability at www.smugglingvacation.co.uk
Contemporary relationships are explored in Pet Rock – the featured issue-long strip of Manhole #3 – as an assortment of males orbit the lives of two backstage rock-chicks: the placid Bea and the freewheeling Carrie. At first kindred spirits, the intimacy between the pair soon disintegrates when Carrie's boyfriend mysteriously disappears and she refuses to own up to her frustration and unhappiness. There exists here a sense of an emotional and authorial gap being filled by the daydreams and aspirations of cartoonist Mardou. Though she creates not so much a romanticised reality as an idealised one, there remains an absence of the kind of sustained conflict that fuels the dramatic conviction of a writer. Furthermore, what Mardou writes seems so defined by her reading choices that this work smacks of simulation. As a result, things like the bittersweet ending feel hollow and unearned, and the story has shape as it goes through the motions but possesses no satisfying thesis. The telling, however, is fine-tuned, the cartooning fluent and assured, and the scripting fluid and engaging. The issue is perfectly enjoyable.
40 A4-ish pages for $3/£2, available from USS Catastrophe
In a session with his therapist a young man struggling for emotional sustenance tentatively examines his psychological survival. Writer Liam Geraghty, in collaboration with Matter cartoonist Phil Barrett, employs a warm, good-humoured touch that sidesteps complexity and analysis in favour of throwaway pathos and a bland, more universal appeal. Comprising a series of mostly-symbiotic, mostly-slight one- and two-page strips that revisit resonant episodes in the protagonist's life (and, in the strips Wank and Slight Retort, that inadvertently revisit works by Dan Clowes and Adrain Tomine) this light brushing of the surface of poignant subject matter is delivered via the Clowes-inspired structure of fractured narrative, and proves a disciplined debut for Geraghty. Barrett's cartooning, as ever, is exquisite; his style possessed of a quiet humanity. Highlight of the issue is the visceral Nightmare, and Boy Campers – wherein our protagonist accidentally asks a pal's sister if he can sleep in her.
20 A5-ish pages for €3, available from www.blackshapes.com/
The antithesis of po-faced comics with inferred depth – which sidestep the writing process courtesy of the tolerance and inherent appeal of this seductive medium – Contraband insistently exhibits meaning and aspires to provide a substantial reading experience. However, stubbornly over-scripted missteps hijack this intent as author Thomas Behe uses characters illustratively and makes few concessions to authentic-sounding dialogue: all speak with the flat voice of a writer working strobe-like through his fine-tuned gripes and bite-size philosophies. Taken in isolation, these ill-humoured asides and acerbic convictions prove interesting, but in the context of Contraband's non-linear narrative, they add a desultory, disorienting clutter that obstructs the flow and momentum of the story.
The conceit which forms the fulcrum of this sci-fi speculation on a dystopian near-future requires little suspension of disbelief: violent mobile video abuse is the new contraband as the boundaries of privacy are blurred in a tech-savvy society that utilises portable digital media to capture and distribute reality torture-porn. When self-styled citizen journalist Toby is forced to hunt down a female activist sabotaging the globe's most controversial cellphone channel – Contraband – his search leads him 8mm-like into the ugly reality of a voyeur underground populated by profit-hungry youths disconnected from any sense of repression or conscience, and with insatiable thirst for celebrity; the progeny of the liberalisation of social taboos, and of our You-Tube culture of instant gratification.
Though the execution is flawed and the economical cartooning style of Phil Elliott and Jim Sharman delivers a homogenising processed-sheen (amplified by overindulgent line-spacing on the computer lettering), Contraband succeeds in imparting with eloquent vitriol the author's moral outrage and frustrations, which inevitably topple into misanthropy; Behe's despair at the decay of civilised society and at the culpability of human nature is palpable. But as the work unwieldily articulates his justifiable anger, one can't help but be soured to the all-pervasive cynicism of the superfluity of opinions and to the relative absence of redemption in the story. Conversely, a glass half-empty is no bad thing when said glass contains vile-tasting medicine that, ultimately, is of benefit. Contraband, then, is prescribed reading.
148 A5-ish pages, $12 from www.slgcomic.com
The dull routine of a pedantic bus-driver is the focus of this week-in-the-life vignette published by Cardboard Press. The route of the No. 230 double-decker through an unnamed urban cityscape allows promising creator Patrick Lynch adeptly demonstrate a fluid storytelling craft, while the familiar dialect and antics of passengers offer clues toward identifying its Irish location. The glimpse of drama offered by a denouement on-the-periphery isn't quite enough to counter the lulled doze prompted by the subdued rhythms of the work, but compositional know-how and grey washes add substance to the breezy cartooning style, and the creator's firm grasp of sequentialism make this unremarkable comic a diverting-enough ride/read. Ultimately then, Last Bus is a technically sound comic with more city-centre than emotional centre. Do stick your hand out, though.
24 squared A4-ish pages for €3, available from www.patrickl.net or www.cardboardpress.com
In part the writing of Michael J Weller is characterised by the seductive refrain of worn-out superhero mythologies, which accrue into passages of mystical, mantra-like transcendence. In this spirit, Slow Science Fictions #16 is as much incantation as it is the retelling of the origin of The Cosmic Crusaders/The Invincibles and of the history attached to their creation and development. Here, in a break with the typed-prose presentation of the series, Weller provides hand-lettered texts and illustrations that reintroduce the visual dialect of Space Opera, and which dip into the key moments and milieu in the evolution of his English superhero team. The fluid, organic cartooning style manages an affecting luminescence due to its serenely innocent quality, and as the book's focus deviates from delving into the continuity associated with overlapping reality tunnels and elevating tensions between the temporal and the divine – towards superhero trope-laden pleasures – this beguiling issue should prove the most accessible to date for a comics audience curious to sample Michael J Weller's particular utilisation of escapist fantasy.
32 A5 pages, £2 inc p&p, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ, or pick up a copy at the London Underground Comics stall in Camden market. E-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: http://www.homebakedbooks.co.uk/wellerverse.htm
Additional 3World in 4Time comix, pics, videos, and comments: www.4time.wordpress.com, www.earthco.wordpress.com, www.blog2blog.wordpress.com, www.addingcombe.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com/mickweller, www.egnep.blogspot.com
A cyberspace data-encoded cipher, which mixes a Hebrew tetragrammaton and Kabalistic numerology, is solved by the Man-With-Blanked-Out-Eyes; his reward: a Bent Key to the Universe and access to the minds of the Guardians Of Life And Civilisation. The Wellerverse turns, and the Weller of this verse drinks himself silly and couldn't give a flying fart if nobody enjoys his slow fictions. Who exactly then is planting themselves into the hearts and minds of the Cosmic Squad, exploiting their doubts and confusions? The Duke and Duchess of Hell, or Weller himself?
Comics, television shows, websites and computer games featuring four Islamist superheroes – the Pioneers of Tomorrow – have been launched, and their packaging dazzles the youth of Syria, Iran and Swabiastan. Seduced by the glamorous depictions of the supermartyr team, conditioned youths are eager to play their part, gain celebrity, and see battle lines of cosmic war drawn between Jihadist new dreamers and the Cosmic Crusaders. The magical ancients call upon the martyrs to sacrifice life on earth for eternity in paradise.
Michael J Weller is up against it, and here, as he flashes the world a gimp of displeasure and continues to convert to creative matter the alarming stuff constantly streaming in from the environment, I'm reminded that the inability to properly "filter" incoming or internal stimuli and information sources has been linked to psychosis, and that the same processes that lead to madness in some, may result in extraordinary creativity and inventiveness in others. Weller possesses clarity of cognisance but writes like a madman. The result is a story of uncommon shape and oblique pertinence.
32 A5 pages, £2 inc p&p, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ, or pick up a copy at the London Underground Comics stall in Camden market. E-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: http://www.homebakedbooks.co.uk/wellerverse.htm
Additional 3World in 4Time comix, pics, videos, and comments: www.4time.wordpress.com, www.earthco.wordpress.com, www.blog2blog.wordpress.com, www.addingcombe.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com/mickweller, www.egnep.blogspot.com