Smallaxe #1
Us size, 32 pages

Northern Ireland as a patch for comicbooklets to grow from has brought only a few sporadic bursts over the the past thirty years years; proportionately less than its mainland Uk counterparts. The graphic arts seem to be much more popular in hardcore rape, gay and guns porn which is more likely to adorn the walls of the province, production relating to organisations with acronym abbreviations.

Artists affording to turn comics into even a part-time paying gig in the last thirty years, oh, about five in number, and in mini-comics artists per decade, about five. Comics aren't really top of the agenda here. About once a decade, a collective anthology comes along. In the 70s & 80s it was Ximoc, faturing Davy Francis, Ivor Lightning and David Morris. In the 90s, DNA Swamp, featuring PJ Holden, John Farrelly, Christian Kotey and Mal Coney. Coney appeared in Crisis, around the same time John McCrea and Garth Ennis brought 'Troubled Souls' to a wider audience. A tale of a group of friends getting caught up in terrorist murder had all the hallmarks of an amateur writer, Ennis' first work, though McCrea's watercolours were/are brilliant. What Ennis did bring to the piece was that all-too-rare in comics glimpse of Northern Irish humanity, which when Ennis isn't overindulging dick and fart jokes, is what he does best (eg. Hitman, and I state, one of the finer serials of all-time, Preacher.)

With SmallAxe, this unique regional voice returns, in multitude. Each of the stories here in some way tap into craic, mannerisms, community/anti-community, geographical relativity, slabberin' and blabberin', darkness, eccentricity, and that funny peculiar way. This is a comic steeped in a sense of Northern Irishness, and as any is a better snapshot of the people than Ennis has provided, and I suspect he'd be quite taken with it. I've only glanced away from the scene for a few years, myself, 11 of the 12 contributors are new names. This is sweet. Only Coney is previously familiar to me among them, and here he treats us to a short yarn about a gay social scene, where he has picked up the pen of the cartooninist himself !

SmallAxe is supported by funding from the UnLtd Millenium Awards Scheme. 'Belfast's Greatest Comic Magazine' came out a season ago. Not sure if theres been a second edition, I'd very much like to see it !

A6, 16 pgs, free?

Another diverse collection from Eire, from coastal region of Galway. Editor James Newell contributes two, bracing his sentiment with offbeat similie and reflective. These knowing winks are delivered tidy and rushed, a range of style capable, as his website will attest to.

'Clever Clogs and Clumsy Clot', a playful start by Sophie Coyle with Mike Judge watered gray and a Harry Enfield styled script in humanity. Synthesis there doesn't pay, but to her credit Coyle talks both well. Will be positive to watch her presentation of unified bond outage in these art skills.

While coyle bags the stapleface of the comik tis James vallely's cool deft and confident expressive 'Lucky Island' that deserves him highlighting the perimeter of a mirror. Vallely belongs to the Glitterati : Lucky Island's subtext of fame to mundane looks beautiful with its marked professional singular nature, its got just the right proportion, patterns, active and multi-scene. The showing must go on!

Not sure how much copies are, but there are still a few freebies left if you contact James over at the website, < ahref="www.meanwhile.tv">www.meanwhile.tv" with links to each of the contributor's websites and an amount of animations, pictures and other impressive art jobs to look around.

(Comic released about nine months ago - sorry !)

In selecting stories for this anthology of 'the best Irish imaginative fiction' by modern Irish authors, Emerald Eye editors Frank Ludlow and Roelof Goudriaan profess to being "guided only by a tale's ability to move, disturb and entertain". This book delivers on all counts, replacing leprechauns, banshees and faeries with paedophilia, necrophilia, genocide and whatever you're having yourself! However, it's not all penetrating Taboo-like studies of damaged individuals, a nail in their souls, their hearts snagging on rusty wire – there is much fun to be had, satire and a Bob Hope-like caper to be laughed at, an oblique ramble to be taken, an egg to be hatched. Four of the eighteen featured-stories are particularly fine…

With detached, matter-of-fact tone, Mike McCormack's unsettling, exquisitely macabre Thomas Crumlesh 1960-1992: A Retrospective details the offbeat relationship between a surgeon and an artist specialising in a kind of incremental snuff-art. The apocalyptic voyeurism continues in the complex and enthralling Hello Darkness, by Mike O'Driscoll, as a pseudo-disconnected actor past-his-peak allows a prurient obsession take hold while struggling with spiritual isolation and a death instinct. Shades here of Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron; the colour of this velvet most definitely being blue.
Essentially an intimate insight into the seductive craft of tailoring, and wet-dream territory for the trade no doubt, James White's curiously riveting Custom Fitting sees a conscientious tailor, and tyrant in sartorial matters, dress a physiologically difficult, first-contact alien due to be received by the Queen and world media. More gob-smacking delightfulness surfaces in the form of Bolus Ground by Fred Johnston. A rich, intoxicating, character-driven root through the behaviours of a stroppy old queen as he unveils his latest paintings, this one boasts wonderful word-smithery charged with bon mots of barbed eloquence.

A mostly enthralling, always entertaining read, Emerald Eye succeeds in providing expertly realised stories, each occasionally with dis/satisfying echoes of the other, and choc-full of afflicted characters, often with an irritation of spirit, searching out emotional sustenance, or escape, and touched by an appetite for things being done to bodies living or dead. With an exhilarating author-mix of professional, semi-professional and amateur - which includes Anne McCaffrey and William Trevor - this is a collection with irresistible rhythm that taxes one's reading stamina not in the least, though succeeds at times in leaving one breathless.
292 pages for £6.99 / €9.99, available from Aeon Press.

What better way to avoid friction in life than to spend one's time reading? In opening short story, Will McIntosh's absorbing Friction, the quest of intellectual Gruen is to read the complete works of the one hundred thirty-seven masters carved into the hopelessly long 'Wisdom Wall'. But his kind are delicate; particularly vulnerable to physical stresses - many before him have been reduced to stumps in their friction-fraught tackling of the wall. Worse still: a sither's scent history will be lost forever unless Gruen aids the distraught Western. Will he postpone his treasured reading to risk wasting himself through such pointless friction?

Albedo One hits 30 and loses some of the swagger and vitality of 29, but remains committed to conscientiously crafted prose. Indeed, with denouements in the form of satisfying reversals, Friction and Some Action, particularly, prove there's life in the old mag yet!

Between these bookends is Pushing Down The Tombstone by Ralph Robert Moore, a supernatural tale predominantly pedestrian, but with its suspenseful notes. Robert Neilson's wacky The Pope, Sonny Liston And Me mixes time travel with boxing, and the bollixed Pope (Uncle Bill-Pius XXI) asks the question "How many popely ways are there to go?" The effective Campion And Demon Boy by Geoffrey Warburton echoes Alan Moore's A Small Killing with no little style and a degree of dash. Patrick Hudson's affecting The Persistence Of Memory adds new meaning to acronym DNR as it chronicles-not the layered life of a haunted man with body clock repeatedly reset via an injected 'rejuve agent'. The promising, Kafka-like opening to Lynne Ann Morse's underdeveloped Two-Face fails to deliver as the sudden appearance of a second face on the protagonist prompts only inane banter. The Cripple by John Kenny is broody stage-play material that offers earnest glimpse into a Sarajevo-set relationship touched by the shared destructive experience of pathogenic war, and frozen in time and trauma by replayed video footage. David Murphy's lyrical The Wonder Of Rocks details one man's transcendental experience in sighting a presumed-dead rocker – unnamed in this mood piece penned with Murphy's trademark musicality, but no doubt a pal of Buddy's.

Also on offer: in-depth and instructive science-fiction, horror and fantasy book reviews, a striking cover by Steve Augulis, Sophia Drenth's congenial interview with Clive Barker, and an apologetic slap for Sword & Sorcery via the Severian opinion piece.

Closing the anthology is Benjamin Reed's irresistible Some Action, wherein the only female cybernetic sex partner which Pleasure Labs 'Tester', the perfectly average John Green, dislikes working-on is the 'Sentimental' variety - a co-dependent sex cyborg. The Lab's head isn't happy either: what use is a man who has not had sex with an actual woman in two years when the key to product development is this man's success in providing comparisons between intimate experiences with sexual partners of both the real and the cyborg variety? There's only one thing for it: John must go out and get some action! (Tell me about it!)

56 A4 pages for £4.95 / €5.95, available from Albedo One.

A graphic novel from Aeon Press, the plush format of which elevates expectation, and consequently disappoints with clumsily placed computer lettering, sloppy, ill-shaped word balloons, and shifts in dialogue often relegated to a single panel. However, with a structurally sound story not dissimilar to teen-targeted territory covered in hip Irish film, writer John Lee and Hankiewicz-ish draughtsman Denise O'Moore provide harmless malarkey in which the light tone and laid-back protagonists fade the drama, but keep things agreeably mellow.

Despite assistance from the Wiccan community, passive widower Jack Kelly - proprietor of Dublin's New Age store, The Wizard Of Od – is no nearer to solving his escalating problems with Russian protection racketeers. When shop assistant Ben is abducted and ransomed, Jack has little choice but to involve an Irish Equaliser – the mysterious, deus ex machina-like 'Stan'. Inevitably all hell breaks loose as gangsters grapple with geomancy and gunfire; and, amid half-baked spells, romance flickers.

In short backup strip, Father Further Investigates, Bob (The Big Fellow) Neilson and Denise O'Moore mix clerics Ted and Dowling with The X-Files to diverting effect, as a sighting of Satan at a Dingle disco attracts the discerning gaze of the Church and the reader gleans a greater understanding of Irish folk tales. Much like the lead strip, this is slight stuff, with the same jarring sequential missteps tripped beneath stamina-lacking rotring. A graphic novel with more niggles than giggles then, but pleasant enough light-comedy for the undemanding reader.

102 pages at £6.99 - Available from Aeon Press.

A romantic little tale of urban hipster love gone awry by John Cei Douglas. With his whimsical and sweetly naive artwork, the birth and demise of a first love are narrated using flashbacks, song lyrics and mementos. It's a really tender and touching comic which I must admit left me a little non-committal on first reading. It seemed too vague and gauche. However upon re-reading it had me kinda hooked. It remind me of a Belle and Sebastian song that you're not sure you like at first (too cloying) but a while later you find yourself feeling affectionate towards. Recommended for non-cynics.

Price: ??
Colour Cover, b+w interior, 24 pages, A5
Available from the author at: 203 Queens Rd, Clarendon Park, Leicester, LE2 3FN
email: johnceidouglas@ntlworld.com