Another ooh in creator Philip Barrett's impressive oeuvre, this tale of the unexpected revisits the theme of obsessive struggle previously explored in The Record and Blackshapes as it chronicles a successful artist's hapless search for relief from a mysterious face that relentlessly haunts him and his work. When catharsis fails and this malicious muse encroaches deeper into the artist's life, his locked-in despair edges him toward the ultimate release, but instead delivers something peculiar and disturbingly twisty: a close encounter of the face kind.
With brisk pace, deft characterisation and curious plot, Weird Face proves an engaging read, and is simultaneously funny and disquieting. Barrett's Tomine-like cartooning exudes warmth and sophistication, and his adroit portrayal of elapsing time and a thoroughly lucid world add considerably to one's enjoyment of this classy comic. Not perhaps possessed of the subtly understated complexities associated with Barrett's more intimate work (Typical, See You Later Then etc.), Weird Face is a crowd-pleaser a satisfying story, satisfyingly told.
16 A5 pages for 2 euros/£1.50 /$3.00 (postage included) from http://www.blackshapes.com/comics.htm
Author Michael J Weller pumps enough whimsy into his odd-shaped fiction to gently bump the knobbly high ceiling of concept. Again, though, that sense of a perpetually inchoate central plot fuelled no doubt by a prose writing informed by comic strip vocabularies and visual codes, which offers the presence of super-beings albeit off-duty but the absence of action-packed battle. In this one, menaced by the revenge fiction of Nibs writer Mike Weller, Michelle Jolly's impatient wait for her new dream of inspiration finally nears an end; a dewy-eyed Jim Pannifer must don tights if he is to maintain contact with local-writing-group-turned-amateur-dramatic-society; and the Council of God have been asked by the Archangels to forward nominations for the ninth Guardian to the Divine Assembly: Sappho makes the case for the Prophet Mahomet, Pythagoras for Charles Darwin, and Dante for William Blake, but who really could follow the eighth Guardian, Diando? (Diando: the composite Holy Spirit of ancient goddesses Ppamms, Dido and Diana, and of the lovely Jill Dando.)
28 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
Despite the plushy format and intellectualising-foreword provided by new publisher Blank Slate, this collection of Oliver East's self-published Trains Are Mint comics vitally remains the work of a bemused underdog: the drawings are crude, colour-washed insinuations of urban localities, and East writes just like regular folks, too. The subject matter is congruent with this common man crafting: shops, pylons, factories, terraced housing etc. all come into view as East's good-humoured record of loner treks between Manchester and Blackpool maps well-worn haunts and the things we live a little distance from. It's uneventful stuff, which speaks of mortal tedium, but which seductively offers a creator at peace with his crafting ability and with his environment.
Hardback, £12.99 / $24.99 for 124 A5-ish pages, available from www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk
In Social Reality Earthtime 2008 it is personalities not policies that celebrity culture demands in electoral voting markets. What voters don't know is that Sir Michaeal Spearate, the Duke of Hell, now operates in all ten Realities with his bent key to the universe, and that Samuel L Poitier new Commander of the Cosmic Squad, Democratic candidate for the American presidential election and possessor of feminine upper figure had been built and animated at Spearate's laboratories in the depths of Dis and is the intellectual property of global corporation Earthco; senator Poitier is a world leader born to be cloned for all continents and all nations in multiple simulations. Meanwhile in Britain, Conservative leader David Eton-Trifle stirs, and Prime Minister Gordon Scott's Presbyterian leadership style proves unpopular. (Come back Tony Blandford, all is forgiven!)
Just as the curtain closes on jostling for a Way Out West Wing, it opens again to reveal author Michael J Weller furiously tugging at the levers of his Wellerverse selves and at characters that are simply aspects of a fragmented personality: dead novelist MJ Weller confronts Mick Weller as he sells his home-baked, cock-eyed booklets at Camden's London Underground Comics; Michelle Jolly refuses to be written into the nasty, horrid, paranoid drivel of a nutcase she is doing something else. Here the exploration of the author's troubled interior universe veers toward self-indulgence his career dyspepsia and resultant creative-deprecation overtly communicated through dialogue too on the nose but the narrative counters with some existential comment on the substance of what we do to confer meaning on our lives. (Hang in there, Mikes!)
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
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/