A flip book, pocket size, 16 pages. Just as promising as the titles suggest. The perfect comic.
£1.50 plus £1 postage (ok, not quite perfect) from here
Dan Lester's third twenty-four hour comic has a bookish gift quality to it : except its not terribly well drawn or printed. Does this sort of thing really need to be ? Past that, this fakt comix be consistent in pacing, imagination and gags. A sure candidate for presents and a rollicking good read. My intuition tells me this will make for many additional printings. I certainly enjoyed it and I'd like you to also.
A pound, plus fifty pence postage and packing. Available contacting Dan at monkeysmightpuke dot com or call by Camden market stall, London Underground Comcis
Graham Bettany, best known for his rockstar demeanour,for one of his provocative comics getting him fired from his job, and for drinking with Bisley, the prize being Bilsey's comics expo badge. And way too many other sinful actions to mention !
Grave Graham's comics leap out of the page and bite the reader on the nose : somewhere between 3-D and 5-D, this frenzy of activity in defiance to 'glossing over'. Calls to an investigation, a deciphering of shapes and form, Graham Bettany's characters often lack social charms, sprouting excesses of shallow, sexist slander which makes for a difficult read. Challlenging is kind of the point. 'Grave Graham Presents' is loaded with street punk rock and its got attitude and swagger in spades.
To order a copy contact PeterLally at gmail dotcom - probably about two pounds and fifty. Usually on sale weekly at Camden. There are about three issues out.
Dan Lester, if you didn't know, hhas tasked himself with creating a twenty-four hour comic each month for the next year. This is his second - delivers us the tale of Bruce Lee, who does well Bruce Lee-ish things as delivered through the filter of Lester's giant sized re-voicing, laced with hyperbole and fantastical ambition. Bruce Lee must fight you ! Theres probably an element of this is based on Lester's finely regarded Bruce Lee piccy, see here This travels with a secondary narrative - Dave Sim is on the streets and delivering bible readings, as Dan put it, "in much the same way that David Blaine does his magic tricks".
Sim and Lee (oh!), their tales alternate, parallel, and travel resolving themselves around one another. I quite enjoyed this comic.
'New Adventures of Bruce Lee' can be ordered for one quid fifty plus fifty postage and packing from Dan at monkeysmightpuke dot com. Its also usually available at the Camden London Underground Comics stall.
An epic story of revenge, redemption and Lego, Mister Amperduke is the graphic novel from The Shiznit's Bob Byrne, which reintroduces the world first glimpsed in the pages of MBLEH!, and continues the cartoonist's penchant for crafting the kind of wordless narratives familiar to readers of his 2000AD work. However, with its 150 pages of story-without-words, which predominantly consists of a bludgeoning 16-panel grid per page, this tome at times offers a reading experience not dissimilar to holding one's tongue, and rather than further develop the adult themes and subtext briefly explored in MBLEH!'s original Amperduke six-pager, Byrne targets the AVP generation with standard-issue schlock-horror, albeit dressed curiously and crafted with unerring grasp of sequentialism.
With Mr Amperduke hospitalised, a cruel grandchild bent on genocide surreptitiously introduces a monster to the miniature city of Amperduke's basement, a place inhabited by sentient creatures with Lego-men attire. The hardcore carnage of familiar genre territory follows, Amperville's Trumptonshire-like serenity replaced by much hi-octane action and violence as its citizens struggle for survival. For Byrne it's a return to the gratuitously unpleasant abuse of cute, bug-eyed cartoons with vulnerable, child-like characteristics, and despite delusional claims for greater substance in the book's foreword, the human interest aspect of the story is relegated to book-ends and fails to elevate a narrative hued with defective personality and caught in the gush of opened arteries. Yep, the kids'll love this to bits!
160 A5 pages for £11.95 / €14.95, available from clamnuts.com
Addingcombe solicitor Sally Harper makes the case for the defence of Sadar Saddubin's killer, Frederick Burrell: it's an epistemological mystery, with intellectual derangement a consequence. Equally baffling to the authorities and, in particular, to Detective Inspector Jim Pannifer, is the whereabouts of Glenford Gates – eye-witness to the murder of Mayor Scourge, and chief suspect – despite the fact that Gates features regularly on EarthCo tv, securing his place via televised adventures as one of four Cosmic Crusaders!
Meanwhile, death-dealer in Futures markets, Sir Michaeal Spearate, plans to use his lab to make a black candidate for the Democrats, and President Jack Flash is advised to face an inconvenient truth head on: EarthCo are the Fossil Fuel Lobby, but by claiming to reduce production of essential fuels to scarcity levels, commodity values for EarthCo shareholders will rise (private gain, public loss). Spearate will not be satisfied until the last tree has been logged down and the planet has melted into a fossilized, empty desert.
Mike Weller continues to serve the reader well with his capacity to take the facts and manufacture from them an inventive narrative that corresponds with his world-view, and wherein the familiarity of the dystopia presented prompts a sense of urgency. Whether or not a particular economic system contributes to the destruction of the planet more significantly than another, one can't help but approve of Weller's demonising of capitalism and, in general, his portrayal of politics and religion as conduits of evil. Funny, disturbing stuff.
32 A5 pages, £2 inc p&p, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ. E-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: http://www.homebakedbooks.co.uk/wellerverse.htm
Additional 3World in 4Time comix, pics, videos, and comments: www.4time.wordpress.com, www.earthco.wordpress.com, www.blog2blog.wordpress.com, www.addingcombe.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com/mickweller, www.egnep.blogspot.com