The Comix Reader 1

I saw this on the counter at Gosh! and it looked appealing, and when I asked if it was any good, the assistant shrugged and mentioned that another really liked it, so why not? This is a 24-page tabloid newsprint comic, mostly in colour, for £1, seeking the old underground spirit. A noble aim, and I am all for the format and price, but is it any good? Well, I guess some of it is and some of it isn’t, but I really enjoyed it pretty much all the way, and maybe the variation in quality as well as style even helped with that. Something about the patchiness was endearing, made it something other than another slick but dull comic, in the way that old underground comix were rarely all golden. Also, maybe I have missed stripzines and self-published comics over my years largely away from comic fandom. Anyway, some specifics.

Editor Cowdry is kind of a bold, confident cartoonist, his cover providing what I hope becomes an emblem for the series in its spiffy kid sitting on a wall reading a comic while unhappy people walk past, thoughts summarised in one symbol each – we see this neat economy in his several newspaper-strip-format pieces inside, too.

O’Connell and Elwick start the interior with a slick McCayesque piece of elegant slapstick. I loved the rather ludicrous Kolchakaish superhero strip by Lord Hurk, in which King Cecil I turns into a huge flying superpowered eye. Ralph Kidson provides a crude but dense deconstruction of TV news. Tobias Tak’s fairytale (imagine Richard Sala doing The Wizard of Oz) fizzles out after some strong moments. Daniel Locke provides powerful characters sketches in sequences of tiny figures made up largely of solid black shapes. Kat Kon’s four large faces with a line of speech each are on the opposite page, a good moment of editorial acumen, showing another way of expressing character with economy and style.

Paul O’Connell’s ‘Sabrina’ is the most technically impressive page: a Friedmanish account of a minor starlet told in solarised images like a Warhol fumetti. Alex Potts gives us an amusing confessional autobio piece around tube travel and minor violence. Skag has another dig at superhero comics, among other things – I think this is something to limit in future issues. Jimi Gherkin waffles a bit and seems far too self-satisfied. Peter Lally offers a clumsy assault on Banksy, who thoroughly deserves every bit of it.

Another favourite is Darron Northall & Paul Brown’s strip, somewhere between the Beano and our own glorious Martin Hand in style. Steve Tillotson offers something with a deep strangeness vaguely reminiscent of Miyaki, and I had the feeling I could have read much, much more of it. The one old pal of mine in this, Sina, rather stretches a strip-size moment to a full page.

I’ve not mentioned everything, and there are a couple that hardly qualify as comics, if that is important. Mostly it made me happy to turn to each new page and find something distinct and unpredictable, and often very good. You can hardly get bored when nothing stretches beyond a page and the next thing is utterly different. A delight, and I hope you’ll all buy it if you see it in your shop, or email the editor.