Thunder Brother: Soap Division 1-4

Straight Kennedy, long term resident of Jubilee Street, paranoid and weird after an unfortunate stalking experience by an ex, has just bought a copy of TV Guide to find himself and his terrible woes splashed all over its front cover. Inside, in garish, merciless detail, the magazine’s editorial confirms his worst fears – his whole life has been played out as prime time entertainment in another world’s soap operas. Nightmare!

There are touches of The Truman Show around Paul Rainey’s latest self-published series, Thunder Brother: Soap Division. In it the characters and events of TV soaps occur in “artificial worlds grown parallel to our own” – a TV suit explains, “producing drama of that quality several times a week would be too expensive, even if it were possible”  – but unlike The Truman Show, this isn’t known by the audience, who watch edited highlights from the soap world as Oakfield, West Enders and Jubilee Street.

The inhabitants of the soap worlds are “less complex than we are, which is why they often overreact to the tiniest things”, but stray information occasionally seeps in or is planted from the audience world into the world of the soaps, and when it does people like Straight Kennedy can become aware that the lowest and best moments of their lives have been being played out to millions of tea time viewers.

The series opens with lead character, soap opera loving schoolgirl Sally Timmins, applying for an apprenticeship on Soap Suds magazine. The job turns out to be a covert recruitment operation by the Soap Division and Sally is soon inducted into the top secret world of soap security by its Spurs supporting field operative Thunder Brother.

Sally’s dual role job is to smooth over the cracks that occur when one world believes its soaps to be fiction (getting actor robot doubles to interviews and the like) and also to deal with the existential crises triggered when the Soap World people find out their miseries are the fuel of an ongoing serial drama.

Like Rainey’s previous series, There’s No Time Like The Present, the conceit is grounded by believable  and very well defined characters. Sally, in particular, is a hugely likable character, Rainey’s given her an innocence and humour that seems very real – she’s a young 13, for sure, but he’s given her a teen personality that doesn’t go any where near angsty cliche.

Somehow related to that is, though it doesn’t say it, the comic couldn’t have come from anywhere but the South East of England and couldn’t have been written by anyone who didn’t grow up watching Grange Hill and dodgy British comedy. Because for all its science-fictiony dimension hopping Thunder Brother: Soap Division’s  feet are set firmly on the ground. The real concerns are getting off work to see the Spurs, will I get a meal allowance? The problems and paradoxes of a Soap World existing are being enjoyably played with as the series goes on, but it’s the solid characters that really keep it going.

If you’ve not read any of Rainey’s work then you should. You can get Thunder Brother: Soap Division and his other mags from some good comics shops and direct from Paul here.