Bad Habits.

So I'll start actually writing about the damned things soon. I've been reading. On the bus, in the garden, at home, in work. I've been carrying comics about. I've been humping books around. I've been toting my tablet. I was going to write about Smell of Steve, but I can't find a decent enough image online. And I'm nowhere near a scanner. So I've stolen this scan from the internet (relax, I do have this postcard at home and could have scanned it in if I'd been somewhere near a scanner). It's advertising Josh Simmons' Habit #1. I took the image form Josh Simmons' tumblr. I hope he doesn't mind.

Habit #1 is one of the comics I will be writing about. It's a new comic. I will mainly be writing about old comics. I'm hoping to be able to pick up on new stuff as a consequence of writing this stuff and doing the consequent digging. Yesterday, for example, I found out that Dark Horse published a Smell of Steve anthology entitled Planet of Beer. When I find it cheap enough I will buy it.

A partial list of comics I've read since June 26th, or plan to read in the next six months includes Habit #1 (see above), It Was The War of the Trenches, Plastic Man, Love and Rockets, Neat Stuff, The Terrible Tales of the Teenytinysaurs, Smell of Steve, Pogo, TV Century 21, Marshall Law, The Comics Journal, Playing Out, Building Stories, The Hive, The Horror! The Horror!, A Handful of Groats, Beer Nutz, Flesh and Bone, Valiant and a fistful of Oily releases.

Watch this space. I'll soon be open to suggestions.

Really Free.

rachaelball, originally uploaded by mithering.

Sometimes things just fall into place. Spent some time on Twitter recently wondering what had happened to Rachael Ball, the fantastic and talented comic book artist who I was lucky to work with for a very short while at City Life. Then, on Sunday, having been instructed that 'those shelves will have to go' I was going through some old boxes of stuff and came across various issues of Hungry and Homeless, a free magazine I used to produce with Mr. Richard Hector-Jones and Mr. Jay Taylor. On top was the one which had a cover drawn by Rachael Ball.



Hungry and Homeless started out as an A4 sheet, folded down to A7 in order to create a pleasing little beast which we used to leave in the bars, shops and public conveniences of Manchester. To quote one issue, "Reviews hardly ever exceed 20 words, features end around fifty, and interviews are usually one question." Those were the rules. We accidentally invented Twitter. In the end we produced about 16 issues, the later ones, including the Rachael Ball one above, were A3 folded down to A6, with covers drawn by a number of comic book 'superstars', including D'Israeli, Evan Dorkin, Sue Platt, Phillip Bond and (to his great confusion) Art Spiegelman. Random interviewees included Arthur Lee of Love, DJ Superstar Justin Robertson, Her out of Bikini Kill, Al Jourgensen of Ministry and Ornette Coleman.



In the spirit of giving, I rescued a small number of spare copies from the bin and will send them to those of you who want them, and who promise me they will not be offended, insulted or otherwise outraged by the offensive juvenalia contained therein. e-mail details to rapwithlester -AT- googlemail -DOT- com (reconstruct the address using Airfix Glue).

Sally Cinnamon.

sallyhead, originally uploaded by mithering.

Given the obsessive, list-making, desire for clarity and rediscovery that drives so many comics fans it's amazing how little information about or passion for 'girls' comics there is. Granted, the fare served up in many of them was pretty weak - Bunty and Tammy in particular - but some of the more war-centred boys comics suffered from a similar lack of tone.

There are exceptions to this. Girls' horror comic Misty has managed to maintain a high profile based on the back of how many boys read their sister's copy during it's two year run between February 78 and January 1980. I know, I was one of them. That said, I had been reading girls' comics since the early 70s due to being at the end of a long chain of handed-down titles which because it had both boys and girls contributing meant I got my hands on Bunty, Valentine and June as well as The Beano, The Valiant and Scorcher, amongst others.

A couple of summers back I picked up a couple of hundred comics from a car boot sale in North Wales to get my hands on a few copies of The Valiant. I intended to sell on the rest at some point, mainly a large number of Tammy comics, and a handful of other girls' titles. One of which was Sally, 'The Paper for Adventure-Loving Girls'.

On further inspection, Sally, which was published by Fleetway, and ran for 94 issues between June '69 and March '71, was pretty interesting. The subject matter of the strips was similar to that in many girls' comics of the period - misery, subjugation and dealing with your mischevious younger brother or unsympathetic stepmother - but the settings were different. Instead of the usual public school or domestic worlds, the characters in Sally operate in something closer to that favoured in non-war, non-comedy, boys' comics. So we have The Cat Girl, the acrobatic, agile daughter of a private detective dad, Legion of Super Slaves, a group of girls enslaved by evil genius 'The Grand Termite' to help him take over the world, Tiny Tania in Space (the title speaks for itself), The Justice of Justine, in which the title character gains super powers from a mysterious cloak and The Girl From Tomorrow which features a girl from the future who gets into various scrapes.

It's not all space and ray guns - Farm Boss Fanny is traditional and class-obsessed, The Castle Kids and The Very Important Cow is as dull as it sounds, and Daddy Come Home! brilliantly plays on youngsters' fears of parental abandonment in a World War Two setting.



Anyhow, have a look for yourselves. I've uploaded a complete scan of this issue in CBR format, which is a full-screen image reader usually used for reading comics and magazines on computer screens. CDisplay Comic Reader can be downloaded, for free, here: CDisplay details and download. An issue of Sally from August 1969 can be downloaded by clicking http://www.mediafire.com/?rzyntzcbmnz

Let me know what you think.

It's Over.

The cover of The DFC #1, originally uploaded by mithering.

So the Great White Hope of British children’s comics has finally come a cropper. As of issue 43 (only three more issues to come after tomorrow’s issue 40 hits the doormat) The DFC is no more. According to a post on the Paw Quality Comics blog, Random House can no longer fund it, presumably because the experimental method of selling it by subscription-only has failed to attract sufficient interest.

This will, sadly, leave several serialised stories up in the air, including Philip Pullman’s John Blake, Mo-Bot High, and the newly-returning Crab Lane Crew. Realistically, it is difficult to see where the strips currently and recently running in The DFC could find a place within the moribund world of British Kids’ comics. John Blake could, conceivably, be completed and issued as a graphic novel on the back of Pullman’s name (even though it is not particularly good), but would there be a market for the amazing Mezolith, the cute and compelling Vern and Lettuce, or the consistently-funny Little Cutie?

It’s early days, so the individuals involved in the strips listed above, along with several others of quality, may arrange some alternative vehicle, may issue the strips themselves, or may just leave them hanging. Either way, having spent several years only picking up US material, such as the odd issue of Angry Youth Comics or Hate Annual, it was good to see that there was intelligent life outside the knowingly-ironic world of the American Underground, and that it was in a format I could buy for and share with my kids.

So, cheers, David Fickling, it was worth it for me. I hope it was for you.

My Baby's Got DFC.

DFC Reader, originally uploaded by mithering.

The DFC is available in Tesco for one week only. It's a subscription-only comic that's been flogged through The Manchester Guardian to the likes of me. If you've not seen it already, treat yourself. It's not the greatest of line-ups for an advocacy issue, but it does have Sarah McIntyre's consistently funny Vern and Lettuce, Jim Medway's cutely-observed Crab Lane Crew and cover-stars Mo-Bot High by Neill Cameron. A stronger line-up would have included the increasingly surreal and beautifully-illustrated Mezolith and Gary Northfield's Lil Cutie, a tremendous marriage of offbeat humour and appealing illustration. Tremendous applause in the direction of Gary Northfield for providing the first ever creator-owned character* for The Beano, with Derek The Sheep (available in book form right now).

*A real breakthrough, albeit six years ago.