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Japan Inc. – an introduction to Japanese Economics


By Shōtarō Ishinomori, translated by Betsey Scheiner (University of California Press)
ISBN: 978-0-52006-289-4

It’s often been said, but bears repeating here: “Comics are an integral part of Japanese life”. There’s no appreciable difference to Eastern eyes between sequential pictures and prose, so it makes sense that such a medium should be used to educate and elucidate as well as entertain. After all the US military reached the same conclusion after WWII when they commissioned comics legend Will Eisner to design instruction manuals in strip form, and produce similar instructive material for Services magazines like P*S, the Preventative Maintenance Monthly, which even the least schooled G.I. could understand…

In late 1986 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan’s analogue of the Wall Street Journal, commissioned manga star Shōtarō Ishinomori to adapt a serious economic text – Zeminaru Nihon keizai nyÅ«mon published by the newspaper – into a mass market comicbook. Manga Nihon keizai nyÅ«mon sold more than half a million copies in its first year…

Soon after, Securities and Investment companies were using strip brochures to explain the complexities of their latest stock market products and by the mid 1980s benkyō and jitsumu manga (“study comic” and “practical comic”) were an integral part of school and college libraries. Naturally, there were sequels to Manga Nihon keizai nyūmon…

Shōtarō Ishinomori (nee Onodera and Ishimori; January 25th 1938 – January 28th 1998) is officially the World’s most prolific comics artist. After his death the Guinness Book of Records posthumously recorded his 128,000+ pages – often generated at the rate of 200-300 pages a month! – the most ever produced by a single creator.

In 1955, when the boy was simply keen fan of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, the God of Comics took the lad on as his assistant and apprentice, beginning with the iconic Tetsuwan Atomu – or Astro Boy to you and me…

Thereafter, until his death Ishinomori worked ceaselessly in Manga, Anime, Games and Tokusatsu (live action superhero shows such as Kamen Rider – a genre he practically invented) developing groundbreaking series such as Super Sentai, Cyborg 009, Sabu to Ichi Torimono Hikae, Ganbare!! Robokon and countless others.

There is a museum dedicated to his career in Ishinomaki, Miyagi and trains to and from the site are decorated throughout with his myriad cartoon creations.

Following a comprehensive and informative account on the development and growth of comics in Japan by Stanford University’s Peter Duus, this oddly engaging English-language edition reveals the way the Japanese perceived their own economy’s function and global position through the fictionalised lives of a small group of workers at the mythic conglomerate Toyosan Automobile Corporation and its affiliate the Mitsutomo Company.

The cast are idealised concepts of the nation’s business life: Kudo is a good and kind-hearted executive, always seeking to put profit in a social framework that benefits everybody, whilst his colleague and rival Tsugawa is a ruthless, go-getter to whom people are expendable and only the Bottom Line matters. Above them is wise manager Akiyama, with the women’s role exemplified by shy yet passionate Miss Amamiya, whilst young office junior Ueda portrays the verve, exuberance and inexperience of the next generation of Japan’s workers…

The elucidating episodes begin with ‘Trade Friction’ as in 1980 American car workers begin attacking imported Japanese cars. Ever hungry for a fast buck, the US motor industry lays off staff and attempts to force Washington into curtailing Japanese imports…

If the exporting nation is to maintain its growth, it may have to shift production to the USA and leave its own workers and subcontractors out in the cold. Soon there’s panic at Toyosan’s factory and the union is up in arms, but whilst Tsugawa has no problem with that, the ingenious Kudo is working on a plan to diversify and provide new jobs for the ordinary Japanese suffering under the outrageous US tactics…

‘Countering the Rise of the Yen’ sees the disparity in international exchange rates threaten Imahama City as their crucial export trade crumbles. When Tsugawa seizes the opportunity to buy the place cheap and turn it into a Mitsutomo amusement park, once more Kudo interferes, seeking a way to keep all the citizens of the district fully employed whilst delivering a sound lesson on the way to balance family life and duty to the company…

Geo-political affiliations and the ever-shifting balance of power in rogue states comes under scrutiny in ‘Industrial Structure’ when a Middle-Eastern country seeks to revive a secret industrial process and past alliance with Mitsutomo. The shady deals that were struck in the pursuit of guaranteed resources offer huge potential profit but a concomitant risk of disastrous political and financial fall-out if the scheme is exposed. Of course Tsugawa and Kudo and their respective mentors Toda and Akiyama are in the thick of things in a chapter dramatically illustrating how changes in international political climate reshape Japan’s industrial structure…

The nation’s welfare system is tested in ‘Deficit Finance’ as Ueda’s aged grandmother comes to visit and Japan’s social services are scrutinised by Tsugawa and Kudo, who learn the advantages and drawbacks of government-led initiatives whilst both learning some hard-hitting historical lessons about the last (in their case 1965) Recession…

‘A Monetary Revolution’ describes the inexorable global banking de-regulation of the 1970s and 1980s as Tsugawa visits London following the “suicide” of an Italian banker and falls into a hornet’s nest of trouble by involving Mitsutomo in a “Fi-Tech” scheme (covert financial speculation between banks, usually achieved by mutually monkeying with the proposed profit margin) that involves the Vatican’s Mafia-run Financial House… Anybody else positively dizzy with déjà vu…?

When it all comes bubbling to a head it’s only Kudo’s swift thinking and sharp dealing that turns an unmitigated catastrophe into a business triumph, after which the ‘Epilogue’ neatly sums up the subtly effective lessons learned throughout the book and depicts our cast as the look forward to what might lie ahead

Using a stylish soap-opera and captivatingly effective scenario to put a personal face on history – or indeed Global Finance in this case – is a technique the modern film industry has used for decades, with fictionalised accounts of historical figures and events as far-ranging as The King’s Speech to Flight 93 to Shakespeare in Love leading a vital veracity to even the most fanciful proceeding, and it works magnificently here whilst the subplots (sex, political intrigue, bribery, espionage, blackmail, sacrificing family life for the job and, of course, the war between prosperity and personal honour) all work perfectly to put a human frame to what might seem dry and dusty lecturing

Whilst not to everyone’s taste, this book certainly shows how emphatic and powerful a tool comics can be, whilst to my mind it has a far more lasting dramatic appeal than many of its contemporary money-worshipping entertainments such as Dallas, Dynasty or Wall Street…

One interesting point about this book is the perceptible subtext and open undercurrent describing a general mistrust of all politicians – shadings that most British scholarly texts are keen and careful to disguise at all costs. US President Ronald Reagan is constantly depicted as either a buffoon or a conniving demon but he gets off lightly compared to Japanese officialdom, from the lowliest local administrator or union rep all the way to the highest statesmen in the land…

Here the words and pictures don’t prevaricate: Business Good, Politicians Bad…

And on that I couldn’t possibly comment…

© 1988 the Regents of the University of California. © 1986 Shōtarō Ishinimori, reprinted by permission of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.

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Bell’s Theorem volumes 1-3


By Matthias Schultheiss, translated by Tom Leighton & Bernd Metz (Catalan Communications)
ISBNs: 0-87416-037-5, 0-87416-062-6 and 0-87416-074-X

Although German, supreme sequential stylist Matthias Schultheiss, like so many other international comics creators, found widespread fame and success in France’s monumental bandes dessinées publishing culture.

Born in Nuremberg in 1946 the award-winning author and artist began his working life as an apprentice cabinet maker, before studying illustration at Hamburg’s Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation he freelanced in the commercial art field until 1981 when his graphic novel The Trucker began in the magazine Comics umgesetzt (the Comic Reader). After illustrating Charles Bukowski’s The Long Job, and Broken in the City, after which, in 1984, the artist self-penned the controversial Kalter Krieg (Cold War), which was “forbidden” by West Germany’s Federal Review Board and listed as a “harmful publication” due to perceived problems with its despondent political tone.

With The Trucker syndicating in Denmark, Schultheiss met with French publisher Albin Michel in 1985, producing shorts for the prestigious L’Écho des savanes. That same year he began the groundbreaking metaphysical thriller and philosophical tour de force Die Wahrheit über Shelby (The Truth about Shelby) under discussion here.

Three spectacular, challenging and uncompromising volumes Lebenslänglich, Die Verbindung and Der Kontakt (Lifetime, The Compound and The Contact) appeared between 1996-1988, to great international acclaim, and since then Schultheiss has produced a number of challenging, epic works for increasingly broader markets, including the triptych The Sharks of Lagos, The Track, Night Taxi, Talk Dirty amongst others.

In 1993 he produced the strikingly surreal superhero Propeller Man for Dark Horse Comics – to decidedly mixed American reception – after which he more or less abandoned comics for television writing, only returning in 2002 with The Puddle.

Since then he has produced Woman on the River for manga giant Kodansha, Travels with Bill, and Daddy, a controversial and pithy exploration of the Second Coming of Jesus…

Translated and released by Catalan Communications in the late 1980s, The Truth about Shelby became Bell’s Theorem and the three volumes were redubbed Lifer, The Connection and Contact, introducing a vicious, hard-as-nails career thug rechristened “Shalby” and following his inevitable path to destruction after he’s picked out by an incomprehensible universe to endure the cosmic vagaries of quantum mechanics in irresistible motion…

Just in case you were wondering: the new title comes from John Stewart Bell’s 1964 paper “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox”, in which the renowned Irish physicist addressed the objections cited by science giants Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen who didn’t fully accept the plausibility of a Theory of Quantum Mechanics.

Summed up in the statement “No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of Quantum Mechanics”, Bell introduced the concept of Hidden Variable Theories to show how the old guard’s stipulations that the effects of Locality and Realism negated the possibility of quantum physics.

I’m sure I’ve got that all wrong, but suffice to say for the sake of the comic tale here, it means that all events are connected in ways we can’t necessarily perceive or understand…

Lifer introduces Shalby, a vicious criminal not long for this world. The other convicts are determined to kill him, but after the latest savage attack the callous thug finally accedes to the warden’s insistent offers and signs up for an experimental program in another jail. He doesn’t even care that much if the promised pardon for surviving the tests is real or not…

Deep in a desert complex under burning skies, Shalby is injected with drugs and strapped to a ghastly hi-tech torture chair. The first session reduces him to a bloody, leaking wreck and whilst recovering in the infirmary he is visited by another test-subject, sneaking in through an air-duct…

Even with half his face missing Frank seems to know what’s going on. The place is part of a top secret military project and the other prisoners have no chance of survival, but if Shalby can escape before he becomes too weak he can blow the whistle on the whole sordid mess…

With Frank’s aid Shalby kills one of doctors and makes his break; hopping a freight train and hitching rides to anywhere else. However the drugs in his system are still working: he’s feeling shaky and can’t stop bleeding. Luckily Frank gave him some pills and hypos to counteract the effects of the scientists’ experiments…

With cops hard on his tail, Shalby collapses and is rescued by a young doctor who hides him and tends to his many wounds. After two weeks the fugitive is fighting fit again and his saviour has also provided him with a car and money. Immune to gratitude, Shalby rapes her when she refuses to sleep with him before heading off into the night…

Determined to escape at all costs, Shalby heads north and buys passage to Canada on a smuggling plane, landing on a desolate stretch of seashore in Labrador, miles from anywhere…

The beach is strewn with maritime wrecks, debris and the skeletons of whales. Constantly far out to sea, Shalby’s only companions are more of the vast cetaceans, sporting in the cold uninviting waves.

However, his search for shelter only offers mystery as the brute discovers bizarre machines everywhere: peculiar contraptions of string and bone, sticks and scraps of metal…

When he falls into a pit he finds a mummified corpse wearing more of the impossible devices and headphones made from discarded tin-cans. The place is a bunker of sorts with science texts and esoteric notes scattered everywhere, but beggars can’t be choosers and Shalby repairs the roof and moves in.

The notes belong to Mark Amselstein, a physicist from Hamburg, who also left cash and a passport. The photo shows that Amselstein was a dead ringer for Shalby and his jottings describe an incredible experiment into insane connections in time and space. Moreover, whenever the whales appear, those tin headphones crackle with eerie, haunting sounds…

In all this time alone, Shalby has been unaware that there are hunters on his trail, but when he spots a plane circling above his beach the fugitive acts instantly, snatching up Amselstein’s papers, passport and whatever else he can carry, setting off inland just as winter hits the great wilderness.

Weeks later a weary, shaggy trapper walks into snowbound Montreal, rents a hotel room and emerges as Mark Amselstein, Ph. D. Buying as ticket to Hamburg and idly attempting to pick up a woman in the airport bar, the dapper doctor is abruptly accosted by two mysterious men…

Shalby, with the aid of an unsuspecting innocent bystander, savagely deals with the enigmatic agents and hurriedly boards his flight, but soon realises that he is experiencing horrifying, unimaginable hallucinations…

The Connection opens with Shalby recoiling from a dusty decaying spectre in a parka and goggles, who quickly resolves into a pretty fellow passenger. Shaken, he subsides into pensive speculation and when the plane lands quickly debarks and heads for Amselstein’s old address. Meanwhile in a sanatorium, the normally quiescent Paul begins to strain against his straitjacket. The attendants don’t understand why he keeps screaming “he’s here”…

Amselstein’s apartment is an empty hovel by the docks, deep in the infamous Red Light district of the Reeperbahn. However a clever clue leads the escaped convict to the missing physicist’s true base, an abandoned dredger deep in the ice-bound industrial wasteland of the Harbour.

His arrival has not gone unnoticed. One streetwalker in particular is keen to observe him, as are a number of furtive men haunting the area but utterly uninterested in the flesh on sale and for rent…

As Shalby investigates the old scow he finds more of the esoteric scrap-and-string constructions amidst the shambolic cabins but no immediate threat and, exhausted, dozes off.

Elsewhere his dogged followers are revealed as American spies, desperate to recover the missing scientist who was a vital part of their Star Wars Defence Initiative. At the highest level the decision is made: get Amselstein back, willing or otherwise…

Further exploring the deserted hulk, Shalby finds fresh food and more of the dead boffin’s notes. Baffled by concepts which impossibly stipulate that the universe is constantly created by the beings in it and that all times and places are one, the bewildered thug experiences all-consuming, full-sensory flashbacks and finds himself returned to the beach, playing underwater with cetaceans and on the dredger’s bridge all at once.

As the Americans search Amselstein’s deserted flat, far away the deranged Paul also experiences uncanny forces and as the spies find pointers to a harbour hideaway, the windows suddenly explode, killing one of them.

Bizarre things keep happening to Shalby. For a few terrifying moments the dredger is transported from its moorings to a shattering storm far out at sea, but more disturbingly the convict’s studies are making sense of a science that should be beyond him. The key passage seems to indicate that Amselstein had proved that he personally existed “on several levels without having any conscious knowledge of it” …

On a purely mundane level however, another mystery is solved when a skateboarding hooker comes aboard. She had been Amselstein’s girlfriend and has kept the galley stocked for his eventual return.

Ignoring his doubt and confusion and knowing the scientist intimately, she has no doubts as to his identity…

As Paul begins building his own string and stick machines, the Americans are closing in on Amselstein. When they finally corner their target they are utterly unprepared for the violent response of the supposedly sedentary scientist…

On the run again, Shalby cannot stop delving into Amselstein’s preposterous notes, even though his horrifying visions are occurring with greater frequency. Flashing back and forth across the world, swimming with whales, shifting in time, the episodes all leave him shocked and drained, giving the spies and their hired cronies an opportunity to corner him once more. Yet again however, his insatiable drive to be free saves Shalby and after seeking brief comfort with the still nameless prostitute, the rattled fugitive makes a crucial connection with an ever-present tramp who knows far more than he should…

With unexplained events such as uncontrolled levitation adding to his problems, Shalby is directed to visit the institutionalised Paul and learns how Amselstein’s attempts to pierce the curtain shrouding the walls of perception have done something to the myriad levels of Reality…

With illusions both men can see battering at the walls of the asylum, Paul warns Shalby that Amselstein is waiting for him in the bowels of the Earth…

The manic quest concludes in Contact as Paul unsurprisingly claims that Shalby is Amselstein and advises him that all the answers can be found on “the Black Tug”, but the baffled convict is more concerned by the Americans who are relentlessly pursuing him. Still, in every quiet moment Shalby is forced to dwell on the incredible, unbelievable things that keep happening. Could the ravings and rantings of madmen, bad men and dead men possibly be true?

Events are closing in and during a moment of chill resignation after his faithful, enigmatic hooker abandons him too, the distraught fugitive follows her to the Reeperbahn and, during a violent confrontation, kills her pimp. With vengeful whores, low-grade criminals, cops and the ever-present CIA operatives hot on their trail, Shalby and the girl flee back to the ice-locked harbour, dodging American snipers and police boats and even a helicopter.

The frantic scene is a recipe for blockbusting disaster and when Americans shoot the pilot, the German copter crashes into the convict’s vessel. Pushed beyond all endurance, the fugitive snatches up an axe and lets the old, primal Shalby loose on the aghast US spies…

Far away in the asylum, Paul passes away peacefully as Shalby finds his long-forgotten liberator Frank dying in the copter wreckage and at last accepts whatever is to come with stoic resignation.

Grabbing a bag of Amselstein’s things, the Quantum captive walks aimlessly across the icy scene of destruction and finds a colossal derelict submarine from the last war. Almost unthinking he climbs into the depths of the Black Tug and walks into an inconceivable, inescapable conclusion his entire life has been steering him towards…

Intense, complex, lyrical, contemplative yet still excessively violent and scarily sexually charged, this gripping, mind-bending fantasy keeps the tension honed from beginning to end while constantly pushing the conceptual envelope. It’s also astonishingly lovely to look at and long overdue for reissue – preferably in one extra-long, adults-only single serving…
© 1987-1989 Albin Michel, Paris. English language editions© 1987-1989 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.

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Let’s Be Perverts Book 1-4



By Youjung Lee (NetComics)
ISBNs: 978-1-60009-124-7, 978-1-60009-125-4, 978-1-60009-126-1,978-1-60009-127-8

If you look closely there are definite tonal and thematic differences in South Korean and Japanese comics (known as manhwa and manga respectively) – at least in the relatively few series that get translated into English.

Take for instance this bizarrely intriguing twisted love story from Youjung Lee: one aimed at a slightly older and more questioning and discerning audience.

What kind of parents name their son “Perverto”?

Although we never really learn the answer to that question, this peculiarly coy sex-comedy does introduce a very naïve, horny and troubled lad saddled with that disastrous moniker and a huge dose of adolescent misfortune as well…

Inescapably dubbed “pervert” by his classmates, the poor 17-year old virgin is forced to transfer to a new school after his catastrophically public first romance ended in utter, shameful disaster.

Unfortunately on his very first day another transfer student – a pretty, strong and fiercely independent tomboy named Hongdan – is groped on the subway and poor Perverto is framed for the assault, even though what he actually did was try to stop the real culprit.

Unknown to Hongdan the assailant was the new maths teacher Mr. Pi – and the obsessed and cunning deviant is planning on continuing his creepy campaign against the girl at every opportunity…

Perverto knows the truth, but can prove nothing to the girl. Moreover he begins to develop a major crush on her but cannot act upon his feelings.

Despite their poor start, Perverto and Hongdan grow close. In fact the dopey, bewildered sap is completely smitten with her until she makes an unexpected effort to intensify their friendly relationship, and the confused boy, mindful of his last painful and humiliating experience with a girl, violently rebuffs her. He still loves her though…

Hongdan has her own secrets too. Her glorious young body is frequently marred by unexplained bruises and, most shockingly, she has an possessive ex-girlfriend, Gaheul, who just won’t accept that her inamorata has moved on and certainly won’t let a boy named Pervert have her…

Strangest of all, although Mr. Pi is lurking in the background, still targeting her for clandestine attacks in public places, she doesn’t seem that bothered by the constant assaults…

Perverto and Hongdan are not the only frustrated time-bombs at the school – which like all places where adolescents congregate, is a seething hotbed of boiling hormones. One sadistic teacher is far too keen on beating students, a host of girls seem to be coming to school with no pants on and a classmate of Perverto’s is planning on raping a girl who rejected him…

Perhaps the dejected lad is fooling himself and he really is a pervert after all…?

Things are coming to a head (don’t: it’s beneath you and me) and the devious Mr. Pi is beginning to crack under the pressure of his increasingly insistent compulsion to assault Hongdan and Perverto’s knowledge of his shamefully irresistible affliction…

Driven to distraction the corrupted educator confronts Hongdan and finds her strangely complacent – even actively willing. Getting into his car she hears Pi’s disturbing history and considers his startling offer…

Meanwhile, since he might as well be a sleaze-hound, Perverto joins two equally frustrated classmates in a binge of illicit pornography and, after desperately egging each other on, the sex-starved virgins proposition girls in an online chat-room, offering money for sex.

To their horror one of them, “tomboy”, accepts and sets up an assignation…

Embarrassed and terrified, the trio keep the appointment but, when his friends bottle out and lock themselves in the bathroom at the last moment, the apoplectic Perverto is left alone and shaking to open the door to a girl from his own school class…

As the story concludes with a whimper and not a bang, the lives of Perverto and Hongdan have changed forever, but in ways neither of them ever expected or wanted…

Targeting sophisticated older kids, this tale is beautifully illustrated but might contain a little too much soft-focus, genteel nudity for some readers, even though its extremely moral theme is an examination of temptation and perception.

Clever, thought-proving, complicated, always surprising and just a little bit scary, this is a compelling fantasy of love, desire and obsession, viewed through the lens of a truly different culture and social code; both extremely engaging and terrifically appealing. Even if you aren’t a fan of manga or the far edgier Korean manhwa equivalent, this enticing adult romance series might just open your jaded old eyes…
© 1996, 1997 Youjung Lee. All Rights Reserved. English text © 2006, 2007 NetComics.

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The Gods from Outer Space: Descent in the Andes


Inspired by the works of Erich von Däniken and freely interpreted by Alfred Górny, Arnold Mostowicz & Rosińskiego Bogusław Polch and translated from the German edition by Michael Heron (Methuen)
ISBNs: 0-416 87-150-X

In the West, Poland isn’t known for generating graphic novels or albums, although there has always been a thriving comics culture and many Polish creators have found fame in far-off lands.

As far as I can glean, this pithy, quirky science fiction speculation is the first of only four volumes to make a break across the borders and only then because of the notorious celebrity name attached to the project…

Once upon a time the ludicrous theories of Swiss author, convicted conman and fraudster Erich Anton Paul von Däniken captured the public imagination with his postulate that aliens had visited Earth in human prehistory and reshaped the destiny of our ancient ancestors.

Although mostly discredited these days, that tantalising kernel of an idea still persists in many places; and how different life might be if the imaginative and inventive writer had simply done what he should have with such a great notion and just made a cracking science fiction epic out of his “researches”…

Happily others have done just that and the result is a quirky yet enticing intergalactic generational saga that resulted in a mini-phenomenon in Poland which spread, despite it being the height of the Cold War, through Germany and thus on to a number of other nations in at least a dozen different languages.

In 1977, Alfred Górny, a publisher in the People’s Republic of Poland specialising in sports and tourism, contacted his counterparts at West German non-fiction outfit Econ Verlag with a proposition for creating a new and mutually profitable cartoon album series.

Górny wanted to produce the series in Poland and had lined up the superb Grzegorz RosiÅ„ski to draw it. Unfortunately the artist quit before the job began, instead accepting the job of illustrating sci fi barbarian series Thorgal for Jean Van Hamme in the prestigious French comic Tintin, after which the nation’s most prolific and popular comics artist, Jerzy Wróblewski (producer of over sixty albums and series including ‘Risk’, ‘Underground Front’ and ‘Captain Zbik’ between 1959 and his death in 1991: sadly there’s little chance of any of us seeing those state-sponsored Cold War classics these days, though) stepped in before dropping out.

Górny and scripter Arnold Mostowicz then settled on newcomer RosiÅ„skiego BogusÅ‚aw Polch – who later won a measure of international renown for sci fi/political/private eye thriller Funky Koval – to delineate their epic, if meandering, saga of alien civil war, primeval strife and the birth and destruction of a primordial lost civilisation as well as most of our world’s myths, legends and religions.

When finances and resources in the Warsaw Pact nation began to evaporate, Econ Verlag took on the international syndication responsibilities and the infamous strip took on a life of its own.

The result was eight original albums. ‘LÄ…dowanie w Andach’ (Landing in the Andes), ‘Ludzie i potwory’ (Men and Monsters), ‘Walka o planetÄ™’ (The struggle for the planet), ‘Bunt Olbrzymów’ (Giants’ Mutiny); ‘ZagÅ‚ada Wielkiej Wyspy’ (Great Island’s Doom), ‘Planeta pod kontrolÄ…’ (The Planet Under Control), ‘Tajemnica Piramidy’ (The Mystery of the Pyramid) and ‘Ostatni Rozkaz’ (the Last Command). The series was even rebound in two huge compilation volumes for Polish consumption: true collector’s items these days…

In 1978 British publisher Methuen Children’s Books (who also published Herge’s Tintin at the time) picked up the English language rights for the first four books and released them – complete with spurious fringe-science trimmings – to a largely unimpressed public.

Now, with time having stripped away the ludicrous faux facts and messianic furore underpinning the tales, I want to examine what is actually a pretty impressive and entertaining piece of speculative fiction dressed in a workmanlike and rather enthralling no-nonsense art style that will delight fans of illustrated storytelling…

The adventure begins millennia ago with Descent in the Andes, as a colossal flying saucer carrying hundreds of scientists from Delos in the Sagittarius Nebula establishes orbit above Earth.

The crewmen are all amnesiac, having had their memories wiped to better survive the rigours of a nine-year hibernation. Greeted by mission leader Ais and her subordinates Chat and Roub – an “Academy of Wise Rulers” – the space voyagers are swiftly re-educated; re-learning that the Great Brain of Delos has dispatched them all to find a new world, since their home planet is on the verge of annihilation. Moreover, although the voyagers have slept for nearly a decade, on Delos a thousand years have passed…

After a heated but fruitless debate about the possibilities of returning home, the men resolve to carry out their mission and colonise the blue planet below, using their incredible science to create a sub-species of themselves able to thrive on the alien world and propagate the culture and civilisation of Delos.

Once that is achieved the great ship will move on, finding more suitable worlds and repeating the procedure…

The Earth is a wilderness with abundant flora and fauna, teeming with potentially hostile micro-organisms, but the first explorers to make planet-fall discover that the true threat comes from lethal apex predators. Moreover, one of the apelike indigenous species has begun to make and master stone tools…

Tensions are high on the orbiting ship and Chat and Roub are increasingly at odds. Soon after a first land-base is established, the latter foments mutiny and forcibly attempts to make Ais his bed-mate. Not for the first time, the commander ponders the Great Brain’s wisdom in placing only one woman on the ship…

The colonists decide to create a labour force by domesticating the smart apes and chief scientist Zan discovers that they possess a close affinity to Delosian biology. With a little tinkering perhaps the primitives will be able to continue the legacy of Delos…

The mission begins to further unravel when the lonely, over-worked crewmen discover the primitives’ skill in fermenting alcohol and lapse into undisciplined fighting and cross-species fraternisation…

When Ais steps down hard on the drunken malcontents, Roub, who advocates scrubbing the mission and moving permanently to the welcoming world below, sees his chance to further undermine her. A crisis breaks when the fuel for the aerosondes – planetary transport shuttles – mysteriously runs critically low. Chat discovers and kills a saboteur at work and denounces Roub, but before they can come to blows a startling message announces the arrival of a second ship from Delos…

Meanwhile Zan’s experiments on the native females have concluded and his findings indicate that for the mission to succeed he will have to directly reconfigure the ape-beings’ genetic make-up, a step Ais is reluctant to consider…

As she and Chat supervise the construction of a vast landing field and base in a desolate mountainous region, complete with huge landing symbols carved directly into the terrain, Roub, determined to stay and control the new world, foments open rebellion. Intent on destroying the orbiting ship and forcing his people to settle on Earth, Roub rockets into space, with the determined Ais in hot pursuit. An horrific duel ensues and, driving him off the vessel, she follows the traitor back to Earth where Chat tracks him to his final fate in the deadly beast-filled jungles…

The colonists’ troubles are not over. The second expedition, under the command of Beroub, had set up operations on a far-distant continent, but when he unexpectedly arrives at the Nazca base, the leader of the back-up colony is dying from some unknown contagion. As Ais and Zan prepare to investigate, the master scientist notices that the natives are terrified, fleeing from some unseen, unsuspected phenomenon.

Hypothesising the worst, the troubled technologist swiftly tricks Chat into returning to the orbiting saucer in the last working aerosonde, as Ais and Zan take wing in a jet-powered aeroglider piloted by Beraud’s pilot Eness, just as the ground erupts in a devastating volcanic eruption…

The entire colony is wiped out, Chat is trapped in space and Zan and Ais have no choice but to head for unknown peril on the distant continent dubbed Atlantis…

To Be Continued…

There’s a bucket-load of plot and plenty of action packed into this colourful, oversized (292x219mm) 52 page tome, and the comfortingly clunky but exceedingly effective art by Polch is beguilingly seductive and something no traditional science fiction connoisseur could resist. Maybe it’s time to revive this lost series and even go looking for a few more of those embargoed comics classics from the Land of the White Eagle…
© 1978 Econ Verlag GmbH, Dusseldorf. English translation © 1978 Methuen Children’s Books, Ltd.

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Suburban Nightmares: the Science Experiment


By Larry Hancock, Michael Cherkas, John van Bruggen & various (NBM)
ISBN: 978-0-91834-880-7

The huge outpouring of new comics which derived from the birth of American comicbooks’ Direct Sales revolution produced a plethora of innovative titles and creators – and, let’s be fair here – a host of appalling, derivative, knocked-off, banged-out plain and simple tat too.

Happily it’s my party and I choose to focus on the good and even great stuff…

The 1980s were an immensely fertile time for English-language comics-creators. In America an entire new industry had started with the birth of dedicated comics shops and, as innovation-geared specialist retail outlets sprung up all over the country, operated by fans for fans, new publishers began to experiment with format and content, whilst eager readers celebrated the happy coincidence that everybody seemed to have a bit of extra cash to play with.

Consequently those new publishers were soon aggressively competing for the attention and cash of punters who had grown resigned to getting their on-going picture stories from DC, Marvel, Archie and/or Harvey Comics. European and Japanese material began creeping in and by 1983 a host of young companies such as WaRP Graphics, Pacific, Eclipse, Capital, Now, Comico, Dark Horse, First and many others had established themselves and were making impressive inroads.

New talent, established stars and fresh ideas all found a thriving forum to try something a little different both in terms of content and format. Even smaller companies and foreign outfits had a fair shot at the big time and a lot of great material came – and, almost universally, as quickly went – without getting the attention or success they warranted.

Most importantly, by avoiding the traditional family sales points such as newsstands, more mature material could be produced: not just increasingly violent and with nudity but also far more political and intellectually challenging too.

Moreover, much of the “kid’s stuff” stigma had finally dissipated and America was catching up to the rest of the world in acknowledging that sequential narrative might just be a for-real actual art-form, so the door was wide open for gosh-darned foreigners to make a few waves too…

One of the most critically acclaimed and just plain fun features came from semi-Canadian outfit Renegade Press which, spun out by a torturous and litigious process from Dave Sim’s Canadian Aardvark-Vanaheim publishing outfit, set up shop in the USA and began publishing at the very start of the black and white comics bubble in 1984, picking up a surprisingly strong line of creator-based properties and some genuinely remarkable and impressive new series such as Ms. Tree, Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire, Normalman, Flaming Carrot, the first iteration of Al Davison’s stunning Spiral Cage and the compulsive, stylish Cold War, flying-saucer paranoia-driven series The Silent Invasion amongst many others.

This stunningly stylish saga – which I simply must get around to soon – welded 1950s homeland terrors (invasion by Reds, invasion by aliens, invasion by new ideas…) with film noir and 20-20 hindsight and was a truly fresh and enticing concept in the Reagan-era Eighties, but of equal if not greater interest was the inclusion of ancillary back-up tales utilising the same milieu and themes which proved popular enough to springboard into their own short-lived title…

This first superbly oversized monochrome tome – a whopping 280 x 205mm – gathers that stand-alone material from The Silent Invasion and Suburban Nightmares with the three creators Larry Hancock, Michael Cherkas, John van Bruggen, and a few invited guests, playfully swapping jobs and pilfering/homaging other stylisations and forms to produce a delightful wealth of twisted tales and shocking stories that will, even now, astound fans of many classic genres such as sci-fi, horror, conspiracy theory, crime, romance and even comedy…

The 1950s in American was a hugely iconic and paradoxical time. Incredible scientific and cultural advancements and great wealth inexplicably arose amidst an atmosphere of immense social, racial, sexual and political repression with an increasingly paranoid populace seeing conspiracy and subversive attacks in every shadow and corner of the rest of the world.

Such an insular melting pot couldn’t help but be fertile soil for imaginative outsiders to craft truly incisive and evocative tales, especially when wedded to the nation’s fantastic –and ongoing – obsessions with rogue science, flying saucers, gangsterism and espionage…

In 1983 the temptation was clearly too much for the USA’s less panicky northern neighbours, and Hancock, Cherkas & Van Bruggen brilliantly mined the era for these stunning, stylish and clever yarns, subsequently pulling off the impossible trick of re-capturing a fleeting zeitgeist…

The macabre, mirth, mood and menace commences with the eponymous 4-part thriller ‘The Science Experiment’ (script by Hancock, pencils Van Bruggen, inks and letters from Cherkas) set in the early boom years of the 1950s, wherein an idyllic new town built on the edge of an operational government atomic bomb testing site slowly reveals its terrible dark secret…

In ‘Welcome to Green Valley’ the latest ultra-modern planned community in Nevada accepts new school science teacher Sam Donaldson and his wife Ruth with open arms. They’re the perfect nuclear family with son Rusty already making friends at Hoover High and another baby on the way. Soon they’re all getting on famously with everybody – or at least the adults are…

However, soon after flirtatious neighbour Theresa Morrow confides to Ruth that she’s also expecting, the poor thing has a minor fall. When the concerned Donaldsons warn the doctor, they receive the tragic but impossible news that Theresa has inexplicably died, but was “never pregnant”…

In the shadow of a fresh mushroom cloud, ‘An Ill Wind blows in Green Valley’ sees bereft Barry Morrow turning to drink whilst Sam meets Hospital administrator Dr. Stewart Carver; a keen fan and follower of the regular nuclear spectacle occurring fifty miles outside his office window…

Still unsettled, Sam checks out a few books about radiation from the local library, unaware that by doing so he’s made it onto a very special and secret list…

His concern increases when he inadvertently learns that his predecessor at Hoover High consulted the same tomes before mysteriously quitting and disappearing, but it’s Principal Daniels who panics when Donaldson finds that some of old Charlie Simmer‘s notes and school journals are languishing in a box at school secretary Madge‘s house…

Too busy and wrapped up to help his son Rusty with his science project, Sam goes to Madge’s house only to find she’s been burgled. Although the place has been ransacked the only thing missing is Simmer’s journals, but before he can process it all, Barry attacks Sam, accusing Donaldson of having had an affair with Theresa…

‘Dark Secrets of Green Valley’ finds Sam barracked by Principal Daniels, another atomic apologist who can’t contemplate any thought that radioactive fallout might be harmful. Whilst Ruth is having an ante-natal check-up, Carver confronts Sam and accuses him of scaremongering, confiding also that the hospital has been running a government-sponsored survey into radiation for years and that the atomic tests are categorically harmless…

Sam is unconvinced, especially as he has noticed how few young children live in the bustling town. Dwelling on the fact that the Hospital’s huge maternity unit has only one baby in it, he leaves with Ruth but all such thoughts are driven from him when Barry tries to run them down in the parking lot…

Horrific answers are forthcoming in the shocking conclusion when the now rational and repentant Barry meets the Sam and discloses his own part in a shocking conspiracy to cover-up what radiation does to foetuses and the outrageous and draconian steps taken by a panicking government desperate not to lose face…especially after spending so much money building the perfect City of Tomorrow…

The mysteriously low conception rate is explained at last but when Sam points out how Barry is still deluding himself and underestimating the lengths Carver has gone to, ‘The Fate of Green Valley’ inevitably culminates in a welter of blood and death…

After the compelling tension and trauma of the title tale, ‘Be Home Before it gets Dark!’ (scripted by Hancock and printed from Van Bruggen’s unlinked pencils) switches tone if not time-period as a little lad desperate to prove his bravery stays out late with the big kids and learns that sometimes there really are monsters in the night, after which ‘Buster Takes a Nap’ describes the problems that occur when a provident, prudent and friendly family promise too many friends and neighbours a place in their brand new bomb shelter. Of course they’ll never really have to honour those pledges, will they…?

‘The Inheritance’, with Cherkas tackling all the art chores, recounts a little boy’s tale about the scary man next door. We all know about those grouches; shouting, cursing, destroying kid’s toys and digging the gardens in the middle of the night, but this one was really mean. Perhaps that’s why so many kids ran away from home and were never seen again…

Stanley Morrison was ‘Just another Joe’ (script by Hancock, pencils Van Bruggen, inks Cherkas); a decent, loyal American in suburban Apple Hill who sold insurance and spent his spare time denouncing colleagues and neighbours to the FBI for un-American activities. It was mere coincidence that they all just happened to be more successful or popular than him. Of course, a guy like that is really hard to live with, but his long-suffering wife was a decent, loyal American too…

Veteran inker Bob Smith joined Van Bruggen & Hancock for the paranoid tribute to the earth-shattering advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll as Mrs. Ellen Nelson ruminates on why her son is acting so weird. What makes him hide in his room for hours at a time? It might be Martian abduction, atomic mutation, government meddling, commie mind-manipulation or something even worse ‘For all we Know’…

Bob Nevin always took the 7:13 train to his job in the city but his tidy, happy life began to instantly and inexplicably unravel the day he caught ‘The Seven-Thirty-Three’ in a surreal and chilling homage to the Twilight Zone pencilled by Cherkas and inked by Van Bruggen, whilst the edgily sardonic ‘Suburban Blight’ saw the illustrators trade places to recount the all-out war between a man and the dandelions that desecrated his otherwise perfect lawn before this splendid initial collection concludes with the Hancock & Cherkas fantasy ‘June 1953’ wherein diligent and hard-working Larry Hillman doesn’t come home one night…

When he turns up the next day Larry is a changed man. Now happy, calm and friendly, he quits his job, ignores all his responsibilities and begs his family to come with him when the aliens who abducted him return in a month to take them all to the perfect world of Alpha Centauri…

Crafted in a boldly adventurous range of visual styles and long-overdue for a modern revival, these beguiling and enthralling Suburban Nightmares are an unforgettable gateway to a eerily familiar yet comfortably exotic era and one no fan of thriller fiction can afford to ignore.
Suburban Nightmares: the Science Experiment ©1990 Michael Cherkas, Larry Hancock and John van Bruggen. Other stories © 1986, 1987, 1988 Michael Cherkas, Larry Hancock and John van Bruggen. All rights reserved. NBM Publishing

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Video Clips


By Liberatore & various (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-015-4
(1985) ISBN-10: 0874160154 Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.2 x 11 inches

Italian arts superstar Gaetano “Tanino” Liberatore was born in 1953 in Quadri in the province of Chieti. He went to school in Pescara and studied architecture at the University of Rome before moving into the world of work as an advertising illustrator in 1975.

He first met iconoclastic writer, artist and publisher Stefano Tamburini in 1978 and with strident activist cartoonist Andrea Pazienza, they created ‘Rankxerox’ for the magazine Cannibale. The character evolved and moved to Il Male and eventually Frigidaire, fully realised now as the RanXerox we know today.

Liberatore was rapidly developing as both artist and writer, with strips ‘Bordello’ and ‘Client’ appearing in Il Male, but when the new, Tamburini-scripted syndicated RanXerox became a star of French magazine L’Écho des Savanes in 1981, Tanino moved to Paris and began working simultaneously on short complete tales for the more prestigious Gallic market in such magazines as Tranfert, Métal Hurlant, À Suivre and Chic. A shocking hit in the US Heavy Metal magazine, RanXerox then led to Liberatore jumping the pond and producing material for Twisted Tales and men’s magazine Hustler.

Some of those aforementioned short fiction pieces comprise the contents of this bleakly disturbing, ultra-violent yet oddly philosophical exploration of the consuming effects of media and fashion.

When his great collaborator Tamburini died in 1986, Liberatore quit comics for nearly a decade. Returning to straight commercial illustration, he worked in movies and designed book and record covers. Eventually, comics captured his attention again, and he produced two new RanXerox tales in 1993 and 1996 (with Jean-Luc Fromental and Alain Chabat), and a piece in Batman Black and White, assorted covers, and illustrated Pierre Pelot and Yves Coppens’s mass-market paperback ‘Le Rêve de Lucy’. As the Nineties closed, he finally came storming back in stunning style with the brilliant, award-winning Lucy L’Espoir in 2007, in which he and writer Patrick Norbert freely adapted a life-story for the famous prehistoric humanoid Australopithecus Afarensis remains found by anthropologists Coppens, Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb.

Still available but desperately in need of a modern re-release, Video Clips gathers seven short, sweet and sour, vitriolic, challenging thrillers by the stylishly abrasive young Liberatore beginning with the self-authored ‘Real Vision’ in which a young celebrity-fuelled punk commits atrocious acts of violence on a mother and child simply to commit “suicide by television” after which the Tamburini-penned ‘Earth versus Saturn’ turns a wickedly sardonic eye on movie mania as a scout party for invading aliens picks the wrong bar to begin their fact finding mission. Of course, it would have helped if they hadn’t used thirties movies stars as templates for their temporary Earth-bodies…

He also scripted ‘E.M.P.S.: Erotic Management for People’s Socialism’ – an outrageous spoof of psychology, political correctness and sexual repression in a hilarious and shocking science fiction setting, whilst the deeply disturbing ‘Shut-In’ by Bruce Jones might be familiar to older American readers as it first appeared in Twisted Tales #7, detailing the saucy, savage hidden hi-jinks of a babysitter and her abusive jock boyfriend as they mischievously tend to a stroke-paralysed senior citizen one night – and of course there’s a superb sting in this tale…

‘Bololy Folly’ is another Tamburini psycho-thriller as the latest technology to tame “wild chromosomes” and bad behaviour cataclysmically comes a-cropper on live television whilst ‘Watch Out for Hot Flashes’ – scripted by the enigmatic G. Setbon – offers a more traditional tale as the world’s greatest fashion model offers an exclusive chance to the photographers who made her famous. Sadly she’s the one doing the shooting but her murderous motives simply defy all logic…

This powerfully compelling collection ends with another Tamburini tale as ‘Tiamotti’ describes the trials of three bomb-making anarchists as they try to defeat a security system which can read their minds and deliver a fusillade of withering gunfire in the blink of an eye…

Crafted in a range of palettes from tension-wracked monochrome line-art to tantalising tonal washes, and even including three lush full-colour paint jobs, this sexy, severe and staggeringly violent tome is a superb introduction to the graphic genius and brutal worlds of Liberatore: places no adult fan of sequential narrative can see without being changed forever…
Art © 1985 Gaetano Liberatore. All stories © 1985 their respective authors. English language edition © 1985 Catalan Communications, All rights reserved.

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Rebel


By Pepe Moreno & others (Catalan Communications/IDW)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-020-8 (1986)      978-1-60010-495-4 (2009)

Born in 1954, Spanish creator Pepe Moreno began his comics career, illustrating for horror and adventure anthologies and children’s papers such as S.O.S., Pumby and Pulgarcito, Star and Bliz.

He moved to America in 1977, briefly working for Jim Warren’s Creepy, Eerie 1984/1994 and Vampirella titles, as well as humour magazine National Lampoon before gravitating to Heavy Metal where his short, uncompromising post-punk strips (collected in the album Zeppelin) caught the attention of Epic Illustrated editor Archie Goodwin.

The breakthrough strip Generation Zero led to the graphic novel Rebel, as well as successor’s Joe’s Air Force and Gene Kong, but ever-restless, Moreno’s growing fascination with technology led him first into animation (Tiger Sharks, Thunder Cats and Silver Hawks) and eventually into the budding, formative field of computer illustration, resulting in a return to comics for the high-profile computer-generated futuristic Batman thriller Digital Justice.

He created an early CD-ROM thriller with Hellcab in 1993 and, these days, spends most of his time working in high-end video games.

Imagined and executed in the politically contentious and conservative mid-Eighties when dystopian dreams of fallen empires abounded and post-apocalyptic survivalism was the prevailing zeitgeist, Rebel – conceived and illustrated by the Spaniard and scripted by English-speakers Robb Hingley, Pete Ciccone & Kenny Sylvester (with an additional tip of the hat to Charis Moe) depicted, in a blaze of pop-art style and colour a future that never came…

2002AD: when Rockabilly gangs, Mohawks, Asian Zeros, Skinheads and a dozen other fashion-punks tribes warred and raced weaponised Hot-rods amidst the fallen skyscrapers of New York, whilst the authorities in absentia used their draconian Sanitation Police to cleanse the streets of young scum…

After a second Civil War and the fall of American civilisation, “decent” men and women retreated to purpose-built Cosmo City and left the Big Apple to rot. Now, decades later, gangs scavenge the shambles for food, tech and fuel for their hybridised, customised vehicles whilst the new civilisation’s fascistic forces attempt to re-establish order. However Sanitation Police commander Major Kessler, working closely with decadent Skinhead overlord Doll, is hiding a dark secret: every deviant captured either ends up a gladiator in slave games or spare-parts for a thriving organ-legging racket to extend the worthless lives of the elite of Cosmo…

After another destructive drag race through the streets, a number of gangers are arrested under the spurious “Social Hygiene Act” but a hidden sniper quickly and efficiently despatches the smugly murderous cops. The grateful bad boys have been saved by a legendary urban warrior – Rebel…

The mystery man has built a close-knit team from his base in Brooklyn and, when a supply run to scavenge food, fuel and beer leads to a pitched street battle with rival Black Knights, the scabrous Doll points out the hero to his paymaster with a scheme to end the charismatic leader’s resistance.

Kessler, however, recognises an old friend and deduces Rebel’s true identity…

Even as the assorted gangs fruitlessly and perpetually battle each other, Rebel is trying to organise a concerted resistance to the Cosmo City invaders. As well he might, since years ago when they were an honest army of liberation, he was one of their greatest soldiers.

Once the war was over and the victors became as bad as the oppressors they had overturned, the disillusioned and dangerous Lt. Lawrence disappeared and Rebel was born…

As Kessler organises a massive armed response in New York to ferret out the traitor, Rebel springs a brilliant tactical attack and decimates the Sanitation Police forces. In the aftermath, subversives from Cosmo approach him, begging the forgotten warrior to return and overturn the corrupt government of the austere super-city…

However, when the troubled Rebel returns to his Brooklyn base, he finds a scene of torture and carnage. Doll and his savage minions have destroyed the citadel and taken Lawrence’s lover Lori hostage.

Chained naked to the spire of the single remaining tower of the ancient World Trade Center, she is helpless, tantalising bait which Rebel cannot resist. Even so, not only must the living legend storm a tower filled with brutal thugs who hate his guts, but unknown to all, Kessler has engaged an entire division of helicopter gunships to eradicate the inspirational leader’s threat forever…

But the Rebel has a plan. A bold, spectacular impossibly dangerous plan…

Mythical, ultra-violent and rather nonsensical in strictly logical terms, Rebel is a powerful and exuberant paean to the fashions, memes and visual tropes of that tumultuous era, moulding social fantasy and grinding realpolitik into a graphic rollercoaster ride that combines the grimy meta-reality of Mad Max and Escape from New York with the gaudy, glitzy flourish of Xanadu and the dour stylish pessimism of Brazil.

In 2009 IDW and Digital Fusion released a remastered and expanded edition in a reduced page size (260x165mm as opposed to the original’s 269x208mm album format) with computer-enhanced colour that sadly sacrificed much of the vivid, pinball and poster hues which made the original such a quirky treat, but as both are still readily available online, one quick look at the teaser art for each should enable you to pay your money and make your preferred taste choice…
© 1986 Pepe Moreno. English language edition © 1986 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.

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Footrot Flats Book 7


By Murray Ball (Orin Books)
ISSN: 0156-6172

New Zealand’s greatest natural wonder and National Treasure is a comic strip. Footrot Flats is one of the funniest comic strips ever created, designed as a practical antidote to idealistic pastoral fantasy and bucolic self-deception and concocted in 1975 by cartoonist and comics artist Murray Ball after returning to his New Zealand homeland, from an extended work tour of the UK and other, lesser climes.

The fantastical farm feature ran for a quarter of a century, appearing in newspapers on four continents until 1994 when Ball retired it, citing reasons as varied as the death of his own dog and the state of New Zealand politics. Such a success naturally spawned a multitude of merchandising material such as strip compendia, calendars and special editions released regularly from 1978 onwards.

Once Ball officially ceased the daily feature he began periodically releasing books of all-new material until 2000, with a net yield of 27 collections of the daily strip, 8 volumes of Sunday pages dubbed “Weekenders”, 5 pocket books and ancillary publications such as “school kits” aimed at younger fans and their harried parents.

There was a stage musical, a theme park and in 1986 a truly superb feature-length animated film. The Dog’s Tail Tale became New Zealand’s top-grossing film (and remained so until Peter Jackson started associating with Hobbits) – track it down on video or petition the BBC to show it again – it’s been decades, for Pete’s sake…

The well-travelled, extremely gifted and deeply dedicated Mr. Ball had originally moved to England in the early 1960s, becoming a cartoonist for Punch (producing Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero and All the King’s Comrades) as well as drawing numerous strips for DC Thompson and Fleetway and even concocting a regular political satire strip in Labour Weekly.

After marrying he returned to the Old Country and resettled in 1974 – but not to retire…

Ball was busier than ever once he’d bought a small-holding on the North Island to farm in his “spare time”, which inevitably led to the strip under review.

Taking the adage “write what you know” to startling, heartbreaking and occasionally stomach-turning heights, the peripatetic pencil-pusher broke most of the laws of relativity to make time for these captivatingly insane episodes concerning the highs and lows – and most frequently “absurds” – of the rural entrepreneur as experienced by the earthily metaphoric Wallace Footrot Cadwallader: a bloke never too-far removed from mud, mayhem, ferocity and frustration…

Wal is a big, bluff farmer. He likes his grub; loves his sport – Rugby, Football (the Anzac sort, not the kiddie version Yanks call Soccer) Cricket, Golf(ish) and even hang-gliding; each in its proper season and at no other, since he just wants the easiest time a farmer’s life can offer…

Wal owns a small sheep farm (the eponymous Footrot Flats) honestly described as “400 acres of swamp between Ureweras and the Sea”.

With his chief – and only – hand Cooch Windgrass (a latter-day Francis of Assisi), and a verbose and avuncular sheepdog, Wal enjoys being his own boss – as much as the farm cat, goats, chickens, livestock and his auntie will let him…

Other persons of perennial interest include Wal’s fierce and prickly little niece Janice – known to all as Pongo, the aforementioned Aunt Dolly (AKA the sternly staunch and starched Dolores Monrovia Godwit Footrot), smart-ass local lad Rangi Wiremu Waka Jones, Dolly’s pompous and pampered Corgi Prince Charles and Pew, a sadistic, inventive, obsessed and vengeful magpie who bears an unremitting grudge against Wal…

When not living in terror of the monumental moggy dubbed “Horse”, teasing the corpulent Corgi or panic-attacking himself in imagined competition with noble hunting hound Major, the Dog narrates and hosts the strip.

A cool, imaginative and overly sentimental know-all and blowhard, Dog is utterly devoted to his, for want of a better term, Master – unless there’s food about, or Jess the sheepdog bitch is in heat again. However, the biggest and most terrifying scene-stealer was that fulsome feline Horse; a monstrous and imperturbable tomcat who lords it over every living thing in the district …

One of the powerful and persistent clichés of life is that to make people laugh one truly needs to experience tragedy and, having only recently lost my own four-footed studio-mate and constant companion of 15 years, I can certainly empathise with the artist’s obvious manly distress as this otherwise magnificently hilarious collection is movingly dedicated to the uniquely charming real-world inspiration for the battered and bewhiskered juggernaut… which only makes the comedy capers contained within even more bittersweet and effective, beginning with the poem to his departed companion and the bluff, brisk photo tribute which opens proceedings…

Once again the funny businesses comes courtesy of the loquacious canine softie, taking time out from eking out his daily crusts (and oysters and biscuits and cake and lamb’s tails and scraps and chips and…) and alternately getting on with or annoying the sheep, cows, bull, goat, hogs, ducks, bugs, cats, horses and geese, as well as sucking up to the resolutely hostile wildlife and the decidedly odd humans his owner knows or is related to.

Dog – his given name is an embarrassing, closely and violently guarded secret – loves Wal but always tries to thwart him if the big bloke is trying to do unnecessarily necessary farm chores such as chopping down trees, burning out patches of scrub, culling livestock, or trying to mate with the pooch’s main rival Darlene “Cheeky” Hobson, hairdresser-in-residence of the nearest town. As is also the case with the adoring comradeship of proper blokes, Dog is never happier than when embarrassing his mate in front of others, which explains the pages extracted from Wal’s old albums, showing the man to be in various humiliating baby shots and schoolboy scrapes…

Following on is the epic adventure ‘The Invasion of the Murphy Dogs’ – barbaric hounds from a neighbouring farm only afraid of one thing…

This extra-large (262x166mm) landscape monochrome seventh volume again comes from Australian Publisher Orin Books and continues the policy of dividing the strips into approximately seasonal sequences, and after a few more all-original cartoons again opens with ‘Spring’ – the busiest season of the farmer’s year (apart from the other three) concentrates on Pew’s first attempts at avian home-making, Dog’s libido, horny farmers and hussy-hairdressers, loopy lambs, wild pigs, killer eels and cricket, as well as an extended sequence in which Wal and the Dog become involved in the local school’s curriculum and cuisine…

Once the long hot ‘Summer’ settles in, bringing fun with chicken-shearing, busy bees, a plague of carnivorous Wekas, thistles, Horse’s softer side(!) and his war with Pongo and Aunt Dolly, Hare infestations, river-rafting, Irish Murphy’s Pigs (far worse than his dogs), Cheeky’s picnic charm-offensive and the growing closeness of Rangi and Pongo…

‘Autumn’ brings piglets, scrub-burning, the revenge of dispossessed magpies, amorous bovines, fun with artificial insemination, fence-lining and back country cattle, honey-harvesting, darts and rugby, a confused ram who’d rather pursue Dolly than associate with eager ewes and Horse’s crucial role in the war against the magpies…

As ‘Winter’ again closes in, offering floods, the mixed messy joy of lambing season, mud, mad goats, whitebait fishing and footy, Wal unwisely agrees to take a class of schoolkids and their puritanical, prudish and priggish teacher on an eye-opening nature-lesson around Footrot Flats. Touched by the painful experience, the bluff cove then volunteers to coach the school’s sports and, after much humiliation, spends the rest of the book discovering how hard – and, for observers, funny – farming in a plaster cast can be…

As you’d expect, the comedy content is utterly, absolutely top-rate and the extended role played throughout by the surly star Horse all the more poignant…

Ball is one of those gifted few who can actually imbue a few lines on paper with the power of Shakespeare’s tragedy and the manic hilarity of jester geniuses such as Tommy Cooper or the Marx Brothers. When combined with his sharp, incisive yet warmly human writing the result is sheer, irresistible magic.

In the early 1990s Titan Books published British editions of the first three volumes and German, Japanese, Chinese and American translations also exist, as well as the marvellous Australian compendia reviewed here – as ever the internet is your friend…

Dry, surreal and wonderfully self-deprecating, Footrot Flats always successfully wedded together sarcasm, satire, slapstick and strikingly apt surrealism in a perfect union of pathos and down to earth (and up to your eyebrows) fun that was and still is utterly addicting, exciting and just plain wonderful.

Plant the seeds for a lifetime of laughs by harvesting this or indeed any volume and you’ll soon see a bumper crop of fun irrespective of the weather or market forces…
© 1981-1982 Murray Ball. All Rights Reserved.

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The Town That Didn’t Exist


By Enki Bilal & Pierre Christin, translated by Tom Leighton (Titan Books & Humanoids Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-85286-147-6 (1989)      978-1-93065-237-8 (2003)

Here’s a masterpiece of subtle moody comics storytelling criminally out of print and long overdue for rediscovery in the frankly incomprehensible modern English language comics marketplace.

Enes Bilalović AKA Enki Bilal was born in Belgrade in 1951 and broke into French comics in 1972 with Le Bal Maudit for Pilote. Throughout the 1970s he grew in skill and fame, and achieved English-language celebrity once his work began appearing in America’s Heavy Metal magazine.

Although best known for his self-scripted Nikopol Trilogy (Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap and Cold Equator) this bleakly contemplative anti-capitalist fable always felt like a tale the socially-concerned and intellectually aware Serbian would like to be best remembered for; again scripted by old comrade Christin, and arguably Bilal’s most evocative and plaintive work.

In recent years Bilal returned to contemporary political themes with his much-lauded, self-penned Hatzfeld Tetralogy…

As if writing one of the most successful and significant comics series in the world (the groundbreaking and influential Valérian and Laureline series) was not enough, full-time Academician Pierre Christin has still found time over the years to script science-fiction novels, screenplays and a broad selection of comics, beginning in 1966 with Le Rhum du Punch with Valérian co-creator Jean-Claude Mézières.

The truly prolific Christin has produced stellar graphic stories with such artistic luminaries as Jacques Tardi, Raymond Poïvet, Annie Goetzinger, François Boucq, Jijé and many others, but whenever he collaborated with the brilliant Bilal, beginning in 1975 with their exotic and surreal Légendes d’Aujourd’hui or in other classic tales such as The Hunting Party or The Black Order Brigade, the results have never been less than stunning.

In this captivating, slyly polemical parable, aspiration, disdain, idealism and human nature have never been more coldly and clearly depicted…

Beginning and ending with a dream of something better, The Town That Didn’t Exist focuses on the recent past and the country’s depressed industrial North, where a strike at the cement works has prompted the death of the aged oligarch who has ruled the town and district of Jadencourt like a feudal baron for decades.

Generations of Hannard have run the web of businesses that put food on the table of the workers, but now that their first ever industrial action has killed the old man, tensions, passions, opinions and rumours are running wild…

With Hannard’s cronies and yes-men equally unsure of their futures, the Board of Directors gathers to determine who will lead the company in the trying times ahead and are compelled to accept that the old man’s solitary, long-sequestered invalid granddaughter has to take the helm – even if in name only…

With workers terrified of losing even their meagre subsistence livelihood and the comfortably installed fat-cats fearing the surrender of so very much more, the pallid, ethereal Madeleine Hannard is dragged from the bleak, rugged and lonely beach and house which have been her refuge for seven years and moves into the morass of boiling cauldrons, bubbling and brewing amidst the closed and grimy alleys of Jadencourt…

She soon proves to be as powerful a personality as her grandfather and by charm, duplicity and force of will manages to unite the perpetually warring and self-serving sides on management and labour in an incredible, groundbreaking, benignly doctrinaire project.

Ignoring cries to rationalise the companies, lay off workers and reorganise the corporation, Madeleine counters with an insane proposal: expansion, full employment and a retasking of every commercial and design resource into the construction of a fantastic, enclosed and self-perpetuating City under a dome – a utopian paradise where everybody will live in perfect harmony forever free from want and need…

The hardest people to convince are the downtrodden workers who have the most to gain, but once they are aboard the plan proceeds apace. Within a year Jadencourt is gone and an utterly unique paradise under glass is filled with the once hopeless and aspiration-deprived citizenry…

However, some people cannot be satisfied even when they have everything they ever dreamed of…

A telling and effective portrayal of greed, self-interest, disillusionment and the innate snobbery plaguing every class of modern society, this lyrically uncompromising examination of the failure of even the most benign tyranny is a mesmerising, beguiling and chilling parable which methodically skins the hide from an idealistic dream and spills the dark hot guts of guilt, arrogance and the pursuit of power in a sublime example of graphic narrative’s unique facility to tell a story on a number of levels.

In 1989 Titan Books released The Town That Didn’t Exist in a captivating softcover album as part of their push to popularise European comics classics, and in 2003  Humanoids Publishing published a sturdy oversized (315x 238mm) hardback edition for the US market, either of which will delight any fan in search of a more mature and thought-provoking reading experience.
© 1989 Dargaud Editeur, Paris by Christin & Bilal. English language edition © 1990 Titan Books. All Rights Reserved.

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The Sinners


By Alec Stevens (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-061-1

During the explosively expansive 1980s comics publishing exponentially enlarged with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat this explosion of upstarts and Young Turks, Marvel and DC also instigated and created innovative material for those freshly growing markets, with the latter cartoon colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned comicbooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned dalliance.

DC created a number of new, more mature-oriented imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but some of the most intriguing projects came out of their Piranha Press sub-division, which formed in 1989, floundered about for a few years and was finally re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this mature-readers special projects imprint, the resulting publications and reader’s reaction to them were wildly mixed. It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan.

However, the delivery of such is always problematic. Is the problem resistance to the medium?

Then try radical art and narrative styles, unusual typography and talent from outside or on the margins of the medium to tell your stories. There were certainly some intriguing results but the product sadly did not reach a new audience whilst often simultaneously alienating those bold yet traditional comics readers already on board…

This eclectic and overwhelmingly effective tome was one of my favourites and, of course, simultaneously one of the least appreciated…

An American Air Force brat, Alex Preston Stevens was born in Salvador, Brazil in 1965, and grew up wherever his father was posted. A committed Christian, the junior Stevens was a professional illustrator by the time he was 20, working for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Readers Digest, and musical periodicals Pulse! and Classical Pulse! Simultaneously he began selling comic strips, many of them adaptations of literary classics, to Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink, Heavy Metal and Dark Horse’s Deadline: USA. After this particular all-original work and the companion piece Hardcore he moved on to work for Paradox Press and Gaiman’s Sandman before forming his own imprint Calvary Comics and dedicating himself to specifically spiritual graphic novels and pictorial biographies such as Glory to God, Sadhu Sundar Singh, E. J. Pace: Christian Cartoonist, Erlo Stegen and the Revival Among the Zulus and Clendennen: Soldier of the Cross.

The Sinners was created at a time when the industry was heading into a speculator-fed and gimmick-fuelled decline and deals adroitly – and with dreamlike meta-fictionality – the nature of a fall and road to redemption in its compulsive tale-within-a-tale…

An aged beggar travels from town to town, his hard life leavened by constant introspection. As he wanders he recalls his past, slipping further into dotage, abandoning and casting off snippets of  memory and personal history as he determinedly devolves into a blissful second childhood, free of doubt, worry or responsibility.

It was not always so.

As his life plays over in his head once again he sees the child he once was: small, lost in a large family and tormented by siblings who despised or ignored him. His father was an official in the Government, absent for long periods or at home and drunkenly inaccessible. Other than his dutiful mother, the boy was outcast, brimming with unexpressed love no one would acknowledge or reciprocate…

School repeated and intensified the situation: his only solace coming in the form of a passionate teacher who filled him with religious fervour. Years passed and he became a social leper. Nobody knew him or wanted to and as tensions grew in the household he became invisible even to his mother.

After a violent family confrontation he fled and was struck by a vehicle which propelled him into a world of joyous fraternity, a paradise of mannered elegance where the only directive was to be happy.

But even here his outsider’s gloom tainted everything…

When he awoke he was back in his room. He brother would no longer speak to him and his father had gone.

The shunned one left school after being blamed for torturing a simple-headed lad – a deed actually perpetrated by the most popular boy in class – and, forging graduating papers, attended a small obscure university. Even here he was an outsider, finding few friends or lovers and these only for the briefest of moments.

Leaving, he drifted, becoming ever more removed from a society that wouldn’t tolerate him, eventually falling into the distant and disassociated company of Absinthe drinkers. Eventually he returned to his childhood home, only to find it a charred ruin, just moments before his tormented father executed a harsh, self-imposed sentence for his life of cruel neglect and abuse…

Witnessing this act of self-immolation suddenly shattered the son’s brutally suppressed and repressed passions and, on a raging tide of emotion, the transformed outcast began a life of wandering, embracing each day and all people, eschewing plans and dreams and even anticipation, taking each day as it came until eventually they would come no more…

Wistful, playful, powerful and oddly elegiac, this moodily moving exploration of humanity and fate is a supremely effective and thoughtful parable for the unavoidable bad times in our lives, beautifully rendered and scarily evocative.

Challenging and strictly for mature readers, The Sinners offers a decidedly different comics experience for those readers in search of something beyond fights and frights and cosmic disasters…

© 1989 Alec Stevens. All rights reserved.