 Great
British Comics by Paul Gravett & Peter Stanburg (Aurum Press)
£18.99
This is a wonderful book: incisive nostalgia, a celebration
of pen-and-ink work and a visual feast of well-known and obscure
comics. In every respect, it’s smashing.
Other authors have, in the past, attempted tomes chronicling the
history of British comics, but they’ve usually tended to attempt
a coffee-table book crammed with dry text, detailing who published
what and when, floundering with the profusion of material. In this
case, it’s not usually a failure of the author’s prose;
the topic is vast, and covers such a range of sub-genres, periods,
and materials that it is truly bewildering to follow.
Refreshing then to read Great British Comics, by Gravett
and Stanbury, which copes with the nebulous nature of the topic
with confidence. Indeed they draw you through the material with
such ease, so I found myself reading chapters, and then pouring
over the pages to drink in the reproduced work for hours.
None have captured the range of material available, from so many
ages, with such interesting examples and percepive writing. And
it’s well designed, with time-lines and photographs to illustrate
specific areas, and my favourite – a two page spread of the
great and the good in British comics, laid out as cigarette cards.
It’s lavishly illustrated throughout, and one of the key joys
of this book is the examples printed within. Not only does it show
the prime specimens of Great British Comics, but also the awful
British comics, absurd British comics, and underground British comics;
amongst them gems I’d forgotten, and others I wish I’d
seen before.
Great British Comics doesn’t dwell on one particular era,
but does justice to each age. It doesn’t plaster pages with
comic covers, but gives clearly printed examples of the inside art.
It doesn’t try to slavishly follow the history with chapters,
but rather grabs logical sections and deals with then deftly.
All ‘round, a good book. Richard W. Burdett
The Damned United by David Peace (Faber) £12.99
It's true that I often take to reading a book more because I think
I ought to rather than because I really want to. After all, why
else would I have chosen to labour over 'Moby Dick' for about three
months before eventually conceeding defeat and renting the film.
But 'The Damned United' by David Peace was different: a soon as
I clocked a review of it in one of the Sunday papers, I knew not
only that I had to read it but also that I would enjoy it immensely.
And so it was, that the book immediately gave lie to the idea that
I only really get to read on the journey to and from work. Instead,
with The Damned United, I found myself making time to read and would
have digested it from cover-to-cover in one sitting, had not certain
neccessities of life gotten in the way, such as eating, sleeping,
earning a living and watching the occasional episode of The
Sopranos.
Of course, I really wish I could say that The Damned Utd
is a novel about football that you don't have to like or know much
about football to enjoy. But it's just not true. Certainly, this
unique and compelling fictionalised account of Brian Clough's ill-fated,
44-day tenure as manager of Leeds United at the beginning of the
1974/75 season in which he attempted to dismantle Don Revie's championship-winning
team and remodel it in his own image, is essentially the age-old
tale of clashing egos and one man's downfall as a result of arrogance
and overreaching ambition, in this particular case feulled by industrial
measures of alcohol. And indeed, as source material, Peace lists
John Braine's Room at the Top, Margaret Drabble's The
Ice Age and the poems of Tony Harrison alongside the sporting
biographies and Leeds United Match Day Magazine and Programmes
1974-75. However, to read this book without a prior knowledge
of English football in the 1970s, would be to miss much of the flavour.
But for those with even the haziest memories of football's last
days of comparitive innocence prior to the selling of its soul to
mammon; for those who recall the days when footballers smoked a
pack a day and ate steak and chips before taking to the field; for
those who remember just how reviled Leeds United were at the time,
with their flash manner, dirty tactics, smiley badges and fancy
number-tags on their socks, and for those who continue to eulogize
the outspoken Brian Clough as the best manager England (i.e the
national team) never had, then this is a brilliant hard-boiled,
hard-drinking evocation of the time and a truly gripping read to
boot. Ian Lowey
 You
Call This Art? A Greg Irons Retrospective edited by Patrick Rosenkrantz
(Fantagraphics) £15.99
Gregory Irons was an infamous psychedlic poster deisgner of the
60’s, who after the hippie hangover of the early 70’s
became a gothic underground comic book artist. In the late 70’s
to the early 80’s he became a controversial tattoo specialist
and established himself as one of the greatest unrenowed artists
to come out of America.
You Call This Art? tells his story from his arrival in
San Franscisco 1969 to his death in a freak accident in Bangkok
1984. Irons’ illustrious and sometimes extraordinary body
of work went mostly undiscovered, until now. If blood still ran
through his veins today, he’d be a megastar. he was that good.
The book harks back to the giddy days of the counter culture 60’s
and reproduces, in full colour his finest album cover designs, as
well as some rarely seen before concert posters, for Jefferson Airplane,
The Grateful Dead and the like. Also on display for your viewing
pleasure are full length comic strips from his days as an underground
cartoonist. excerpts from such comics as Yellow dog,Deviant slice
and Slow death funnies are generously splashed across the pages
in a carousel of satire and left wing political banter.
This colourful collection of sublime and quirky artwork is punctuated
throughout with tales of Irons’ life and exploits both professional
and personal. Compiled and collated from hundreds of personal letters
and interviews with family members and past girlfrieds, Patrick
Rosenkranz exposes the intimate life of a very talented recluse
who never strayed from the left – and who was quintisentially
one of the most visionary pioneers of underground art. Julian
Wickham
Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet (Serpents Tail)
£7.99
Richard Lafargue is an eminent plastic surgeon with a dirty
secret. He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau
and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom at all times,
apart from when he allows her out to be paraded at cocktail parties
and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young
woman in a mental asylum. Following each of these outings, Lafargue
humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers
while he watches through a one-way mirror.
This is high melodrama: not only does the book feature a madwoman,
a crazy scientist and various unfortunates chained up in basements,
there’s also an evil criminal whose likeness is everywhere
and who needs to get out of the country. Enter the aforementioned
plastic surgeon. it’s all way too camp and OTT to be unnerving,
but is highly entertaining. Speaking of OTT, Pedro Almodovar is
about to turn it into a film too. Annie Bowles
 The
Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia (Blab!) £9.99
This graphic novel by California based painter Camille Rose Garcia
sits well in the current climate of impending environmental disaster.
A nightmarish reality created by human greed and industrial advancement,
it takes the eyes and innocence of a child to recognise and to henceforth
remedy the world.
Set within the realm of a fantasy novel and illustrated in the framework
of a children’s storybook, the story itself is told in a candid
manner, involving maps, songs, pirates and the lost world of the
peppermint islands.
The strikingly macabre, gothic-themed illustrations balance well
with imagery evoked by the text, and its references to nature and
animals. However, at times these metaphors may detract from the
narrative flow, taking the reader’s imagination off on a tangent.
‘The Magic Bottle’ is intended as part of a series of
graphic novels, aimed at the young adult market. A charming treasure
hunt adventure infused with political undertones, it unquestionably
is a beautifully designed and aesthetically satisfying fantasy tale.
Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit
Top Hats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson (Fantagraphics)
£12.99
This is the first major retrospective of illustrator/cartoonist
Russell Patterson, who established himself in the 1920s as one of
the up and coming artists of the pre-depression area, the so-called
last Golden Age of Illustration.
After the Stock Market Crash in 1929 his popularity grew as America
looked for a new kind of entertainment, one doused with satire and
wit, leaving him to create newspaper strips and spoof cartoons for
light entertainment of the masses.
Over the next decade, he became involved with the new social and
cultural elite, beginning to work in different fields. While he
was now designing costumes, sets and posters for Hollywood (including
movies featuring Fred Astair, Shirley Temple and Laurel and Hardy),
his illustrations were being published in mainstream magazines such
as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan. Covers for LIFE magazine
followed, as did the creation of his own ‘Patterson Girl’
who was seen in advertisements all over the country.
Top Hats and Flappers brings us an insight into a different
world, one of life after the crash, of the immoral times of the
20s and 30s, of satire and carefree amusement, jazz clubs and high
society. However, Patterson’s outstanding portraits of sexy
and glamorous flappers were also among the first to draw an independent
and strong picture of women at the time.
A captivating volume that allows the dazzling illustrations spanning
a period of over 50 years to speak for themselves... Heike
Schneider-Matzigkeit
 Blight
at the End of the Funnel by Edward Colver (Last Gasp) £19.99
In the words of Jello Biafra, “anyone even slightly interested
in LA’s punk underground has seen it through an Edward Colver
photo”.
With the aid of a stolen camera, Colver photographed the nascent
west coast hardcore scene, attending over 1000 shows —mainly
at LA club Madame Wongs, between the years 1978 to 1983. Many of
his pictures subsequently appeared in magazines and fanzines such
Flipside and NO as well as on record covers by
the likes of Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Wasted Youth.
But as well as effortlessly capturing chaos, energy, exuberance
and violence of gigs by the Dead Kennedy’s and D.O.A amongst
others, this chunky large-format tome shows that Colver’s
focus eventually developed beyond that milieu both in terms of content
and style, and the book contains some youthful early pictures of
REM, striking portraits of Tom Waits and Andy Warhol as well as
pictures of his own art Dada-inspired art installations. Ryan
Crabbe
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