It’s been another busy week with more independent British comics creators and their titles added on to the FPI webstore’s new British Small Press section and again it is a diverse bunch with very different styles and themes. Let’s kick of with the letter ‘A’ this week, beginning with Accent UK, a comics collective headed by Colin Mathieson and Dave West. The guys have been very busy and right now they have no less than three anthologies to entice readers with, with a new one (themed around zombies) in the works.
Monsters grew out of ideas kicked around at some of the UK’s comic conventions and the idea of building an anthology around the theme of monsters, from the B-movie type to real-life monsters; add in a very interested John Reppion and Leah Moore and comics lightning strikes the bottle. Pirates, as you might imagine, deals with those swashbuckling buccaneers of the oceans (can I get a ‘yar’ here, folks?). The guys were especially pleased with the standard of submissions for Pirates, with everyone finding a different way to create a story around the theme and reader feedback showing how well received it was; if you’re in need of more nautical skulduggery after seeing the new Pirates of the Caribbean you should check out Accent UK’s Pirates.
Their Twelve anthology is described by the guys as their most ambitious project; somewhere along the line they decided that the twelve labours of Hercules. Seems like a great idea, right? Hard to go wrong drawing on one of the great myths of Western culture. Of course, it does mean you have to absolutely make sure you end up with twelve good submissions; you can’t have something called Twelve if you only end up with a final count of ten or eleven tales after all. But the (Herculean?) effort seems to have been worth it and it all came together in the end. And I do love that cover; very simple and very funny.
Andrew Cheverton’s Angry Candy offers readers a number of quite different titles, from Alice’s Adventures in Hell (playing with interpretations of fiction and reality, although he also promises “Brief Nudity and a Bad Swear” to help avoid charges of pretentiousness) and the interesting-looking anthology Synchrony One. Angry Candy’s series West, by Andrew Cheverton and Tim Keable, is the one drawing most praise from the comics media though (the Judge Dredd Megazine and Comics International love it); as you can infer from the title and cover, it is a Western-themed comic and I have to say I am intrigued. The seemingly moribund Western genre has been coming back somewhat in recent years, with TV series like Deadwood and comics like Loveless and a revamped Jonah Hex; I suspect Andrew and Tim’s West (already up to a third issue with the recent High Moon) is going to be a more unusual and interesting entry into this revived genre.
Another comic and another complete change of pace: Richard Cowdry has been picking up kudos for his Bedsit Journals and Kartoon Kuts (which has some of the same characters and he says could be described as a sort of Bedsit Journals #0). In fact, more than just kudos – Richard has been pulling off something which most Indy publisher want to do but have so much trouble with, getting listed not just online (the respected European crowd Lambiek now list him) but also in-store. In fact, the Bedsit Journal is being openly sold in a – gasp – mainstream bookstore!!! We’re very happy to have the Bedsit Journals joining the ranks of fine British talent on the FPI webstore.
The FutureQuake team also offer us a mixed range of titles; I’m more and more impressed not just with individual artist/writers who self-publish interesting comics but with teams like this who are putting out a range of different titles. FutureQuake #6 brings us a selection of new UK talent mixed with professionals like Boo Cook, while the sister publication MangaQuake #2 has a more international flavour. Their Something Wicked anthology looks terrific fun and oozes EC-style horror from the cover (no bad thing!), while even working in a reference to MAD magazine.
More variety is to be had from the Engine Comics Collective who, not content with bringing us Marc Olivent’s Seven Sentinels (a post-Apocalyptic world which promises to grow in future issues) and Voodoo Macbeth by Norris Burroughs (a uniquely personal tale of Orson Welles) which look impressive in their own right, but they are also the folks behind Redeye, the informative fanzine that SFX described as “a vital read”. Issue 5 talks to the Rubins Sisters, acclaimed creators of Dark, 2000AD editor Matt Smith, and interviews with Ian Edginton and D’Israeli (the comics one, not the 19th century prime minister) among many others. I am starting to see a pattern here of spotting even more things I want and need to read than I have time to!
Back on the artist/writer/publisher front Martin Eden has issue #2.1 of the O Men, which garnered itself a damned impressive 9 out of 10 rating from Comics International. Rob Jackson is another individual artist/writer/publisher, with work ranging from recording his trip on the Train to Shanghai to the French Revolution, while Paper Tiger Comix is another collective effort, with the third issue boasting some 30 different artists taking part (I like the sound of Stomp, which is a tale about a 100 foot Jesus stomping through a city!). And for Bob Byrne I don’t think I can describe his work with MBLEH! comics any better than this quote from SilverBulletComics: “Bob Byrne has imagination the way Pamela Anderson has breasts.”
So as you can see it’s been another good week and we’ve been delighted to welcome on board so many more independent UK publishers. As I’ve said before, this is a range we hope to keep expanding, so UK comics creators, get in touch with us! And hopefully we will be talking to more of the writers and artists featured here as we go along, so stay tuned. And, as ever, you can find out more about most of the British Small Press creators via their own websites, which you can find in our links section on the left of the screen.
Fri, Jul 14, 2006
Comics and cartoons, News