You get one, if you’re lucky, at every show. For me Guh! was it for Birmingham. That one comic – the one that you want to tell everyone about. I don’t know what it was, maybe the sexy picture of Mark Lawson on the inside back cover, or maybe the warning that Frankenstein may be contained inside. Certainly it was something.
On reflection, maybe it was Dracula’s Boobs.
Yeah, you read that right. Dracula’s Boobs are on show in Guh! You can find out the repercussions that these vampiric mammaries have if you give the book a read, but let me assure you that it’s very, very funny, as is the rest of this small comic. It’s the kind of wrong fun that readers of Monkeys Might Puke will recognise – a refusal to acknowledge that a joke can ever go too far.
Make no mistake – I’m not claiming any great originality for Guh! To perfectly frank, it’s ploughing a pretty well furrowed field, and follows such luminaries as Evan Dorkin and Johnny Ryan in getting laughs. But it does get the laughs, pretty much on every page. It helps that the cartoony art has a polished look to it that is often lacking in the small press, and is reminiscent of not only the above cartoonists, but also Mark Hempel and even Ivan Brunetti. In fact Mr Daw betrays a talent for working in a number of styles, and it’s this shifting that keeps the reader interested from joke to joke.
In short, if you’re not easily offended, and you like to laugh, this has to be one of your first points of call in the British Small Press. Now, if only he and Dan Lester would team up, they would rule the world.
Will can be reached at lordofclydach@yahoo.co.uk. Via post he sells GUH for a pound or he’ll trade for any other zine plus postage. You'll need his address for that; it's 19 Harringay Avenue, Mossley Hill, Liverpool, L18 1JE. His website should be up by the end of January, with daily and weekly comics, so look forward to that.
Five attendees of a night class on 'Understanding Comics' each share an identical dream about being a cosmic-crusading-costumed team fighting bad in the world. Years later the collective dream is all but forgotten when four of the five cross paths again in Croydon. But this reunion is no accident: the Duke and the Duchess of Hell have declared war on God's Earth in the three spheres of Common, Social and Political Reality; in nearby Addingcombe, local democracy is being complicated by powerful developers; elsewhere, committee-prompted alterations fuelled by marketing strategy are made during the gaming adaptation of characters and situations from Space Opera, a small press book which details the history of the UK's first costumed superheroes, the Cosmic Crusaders. The Croydon four – Elaine Clark, Becky Schwaffer, Hussain Elmaz and Peter Piggott – have been chosen by the Guardians of Life and Civilisation to be the New Cosmic Crusaders.
"We have a powerful wish to be something super human," comments Elaine Clark in this origin issue of the New Cosmic Crusaders. This perhaps is the thematic fulcrum of the story: the desire for personal power to combat resignation and victim status, and refusal to accept limitations. As usual, resonant concerns lurk beneath author Mike Weller's superhero trope-laden work, where parallel realities meet in confluence: the hijacking of all that is popular in society by crass commercialism, capitalist bulldozing of our culture, the substance of a response to corporate momentum; and as ever Weller succeeds in crafting a gleeful read while quietly adding or removing things familiar to both our reality and our reading experience. There is a dizzying meticulousness here, too, and endearing complication, and if comics readers are to rest from exclusive consumption of the word-ballooned panel, the sure-footed prose of Mike Weller's Cosmic Crusaders provides the perfect substitute.
(See also: Fanzine Fiction.)
40 A5 pages, colour cover, £2 post and packing UK, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ. E-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: www.homebakedbooks.co.uk