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.

Chemical Warfare.

Jim Medway's Comical Animal web comic is finally upon us. An anthology dedicated to funny animal strips created by some of the finest comic artists currently pushing a pencil. And it's all free. And all ages. So go and read it. And let The Kids know about it. And if you are interested in Jim's reasons for producing this gem have a look at Kenny Penman's interview with him on the FPI blog. It's all about The Kids and choice and quality and all that other stuff that gets you hugging other grown-ups.

More Songs About Chocolate and Girls #2: July 17th 1965.

So here, as the second part of an occasional, continuing, series, are all the ads from Valiant, July 17th 1965. All three of them, and two-thirds using Gerry Anderson properties. Click on the adverts below for larger versions. More to follow.

More Songs About Chocolate and Girls #1. June 8th 1957.

One of the many blog or website ideas I had and never carried through was one which would represent adverts from old comics, because I like that sort of thing. So here, as the first part of an occasional, continuing, series, are all the ads from Radio Fun #974, from June 8th, 1957.  All two of them. More to follow.

'How I Wrote Elastic Man' Issue Two, Alan Moore

It must be said, I have no real desire to read Alan Moore’s output these days, but the impact and power of his earlier work, particularly the Warrior-published twin giants ‘Marvelman’ and ‘V for Vendetta’ and his 2000AD work, especially 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', in the UK and his ground-breaking work on DC’s Swamp Thing in the USA is undeniable. The black and white 'Marvelman' strips with Garry Leach’s ‘court artist’ photo-realist style and Bissette and Totleben’s scritchy, scratchy, surface-irritant work on Swamp Thing blew me away at the time and maintain their power whereas their contemporary and fellow standard bearer for the 'Comics Aren't Just For Kids' campaign 'The Dark Knight Returns' doesn’t.

This 1988 interview is from Newcastle-based music and youth culture show, The Tube, and features Moore talking about, amongst other things, 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', his never-completed future-world tale of the unemployed.

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).

Pictures of Match Stick Men IV

Pictures of Match Stick Men IV, originally uploaded by mithering.

From the clubhouse at Kendal Town FC, scene of February's Mort Drucker for Mad-esque rendition of The Police comes this depiction of Tina Turner, which looks entirely lifted from a Frank Bellamy drawing. At first I thought there was a possibility that Martin Asbury could have been the source, but the angles aren't sharp enough for him.

Apologies for the blurry nature of the photograph - I'm still trying to master the settings on my new camera phone (which resets all the changes I make every time I close it up). I'll take another if we go back there next season.

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.

Never Been In A Riot.

Never Been In A Riot., originally uploaded by mithering.

I've generally fought shy of posting Visual Arts related stuff here due to the nature of my job, but I've hit upon a compromise. From this point on I will only blog visual arts material which is, in some way, about birds. Might as well combine the two.

This piece is from a group drawing show at Bluecoat in Liverpool, entitled End of the Line: attitudes in drawing. Due to a prior commitment and my lazy nature I'd not managed to get up the stairs to this particular element of the show (having seen the rest of it earlier) until this past Friday. This was a shame, as this playful installation by Garrett Phelan, 'Battle for the Birds.' , 2008, takes the idea of an Avian Liberation Front and runs with it as a pre-Digital, wing-crafted, homage to Old School protest movements. There's also something of the uneasy glamour of vintage British war comics, with hand-drawn portraits of the various corvid military personnel central to The Struggle.

The show finishes in The Bluecoat on July 19th, but is touring to The Fruitmarket in Edinburgh later in the year.

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.

Pictures of Match Stick Men II

Hagar The Horrible flogs Skol Lager, originally uploaded by mithering.

Continuing the theme of 'cover versions' of comic artists, here's Dik Browne's Hagar The Horrible advertising the appropriately horrible Skol lager, and Reg Smythe's incorrigible Andy Capp. I'm cheating with Andy, though, as this is a representation of an Avon bubble-bath container from the 70s rather than a straight interpretation of Smythe's line work.



You can see both of these in Jim Medway's charming installation 'The New Inn' at Common in Manchester until May 18th of this year. More information on how to get there and get reduced price food and drink here: http://www.aplacecalledcommon.co.uk/

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.