The final issue – relatively uncomplicated but with trademark oddball-ness – goes something like this: When the number 409 Zone 4 bus from West Croydon breaks down, two tourist passengers – Afro-American businessman Samuel L Poitier and New York script-doctor Mick Weller – take off on a woodland footpath and inadvertently cross into 3World in 4Time through a Zone 4 gap on a Surrey flyover. Addingcombe Hill leads them to the hometown of English superheroes, the Cosmic Crusaders, where, to the disruptive objections of Nasim Elmaz, the wedding of two past members – his brother Hussain Elmaz and Rebecca Schwaffer – is taking place. Addingcombe gives Weller the Robert Johnsons, and with good reason: Poitier is falling for local girl Michelle Jolly in spite of an enchantment on the village which dictates that Addingcombe can live and breathe only for twenty-three Thursdays one year in ten, and none of the villagers will ever be allowed leave. The pair of tourists have got themselves stuck in a weird comic book tale they can't get out of; or in a Brigadoon without the music. (Yes, the Key to the Universe and its nine-notched entry to the Heavenly Spheres of Reality has got mashed up with fucking Brigadoon.)

As author-in-residence in his own fiction – and at a side angle to it, also – Michael J Weller often pitched his Slow Science Fictions as both a celebration of- and lament for- admirable failure as a consequence of a refusal of the artistic compromises necessary for commercial success. Similarly, this artistic disconnect managed to find voice via a lineage of ideas partly inherited from popular culture: superheroes, parallel realities, angels, secret agents, and the battle between Good and Evil. With a magnetic Duke Of Hell sending moral compasses haywire, further tensions were evidenced in mental files wiped clean by corporate medication, or altered to believe in a benign privatisation; and characters scripted to be idiots who break the text that bound them to stupidity. Free will in the context of societal/religious duties, personal power as opposed to resignation, the writer and the written, a peace of Heaven with Hell and other elusive harmonies – Slow Science Fictions articulated a spirit of yearning for ennobling resistance and for the choices that set us apart even as we are compelled to draw connections in an attempt to link ourselves to one another. Mad to think that this series was also an entertaining, funny, funny-peculiar read.

32 A5 pages, £3 inc p&p, available from Mike Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London SE20 7DZ. Or e-mail: mikejweller(at)hotmail.com Site: http://www.homebakedbooks.co.uk/wellerverse.htm

Septimus LePlage is on the run from debt collectors when he hits upon the idea of gainful employment as cartoon pirate Captain Yarmouth in a kid's cartoon feature. This offers him the means of disguise, coffers, and a reluctant attraction "to the devastatingly gorgeous and dangerous Captain Kat." Its not plain frame sailing though, as Linn-Cole employs menace for LePlage too, in new on-set skullduggery from a mysterious extortionist with his eye on the protagonist's coins.

Gurkin Trifle, I suspect, may be out of print, which would be sad. For here is an epic over 200 pages in 6 serialised volumes, introducing Linn-Cole's main comics cast. The follow-up one volume pieces - The Killer Frock of Doom, Gurkin Trifle Gets Steamy and Gun-Boat Diplomacy, focus on variant aspects of character that are established from this. Its one of the great gems of the photocopied comics boom, and the lack of a collection may also be that movement's loss.

Linn-Cole plays with the animated aspect for all its worth: somewhere between Morrisson on Animal Man and McCrea on Hitman. The story of the cartoon allows and justifies this perfectly. Character' reaction to cartoon-ability - shock and delight. By maneouvering her characters the author strips the dual labour processes of cartoon and comicbook, allowing for interest, chuckle, psuedoworry and marvel. For the processes are easily observable and never confusing. For example the suggestion early on that the extortionist may be Linn-Cole herself. I suppose by giving this my praise, I'm letting the cat out of the bag on this one. Linn-Cole supplies her own cat in the narrative. Visually, Gurkin Trifle contains a lot of 'strip gags' form, but also Eisner-like page layouts and some very laboured morphics of taverns and other buildings meticulously realised and animated.

This is really deserved of a Lulu collection or an agent proposing to Jenny it be put online. It may still be available as print on demand. Drop Jenny a line via her website, were you can check out a number of LePlage's further adventures and other great comics and animations shes worked on. The address is http://jennylinncole.myartsonline.com/ and if I haven't convinced you to click on that link you obviously shouldn't be here.