Well can you believe it is Friday already? A whole week of British Comics Month gone by already and boy we’ve been busy with articles, interviews and organising more to come throughout July. Of course, this is only one side of BCM – the other is supporting British independent comics creators and thanks to coverage from other online chums, notable Bugpowder and Down the Tubes (thanks, guys, appreciated) we’ve been receiving emails from interested writers and artists around the comics isles.
While we are still receiving more enquiries every day and obviously will continue to push British Indy comics on our webstore long after British Comics Month has finished, I thought it would be good after this first week to post a quick roundup of the folks who have come onboard so far and who we are very happy to be listing.
Anime fans rule the country … but it’s not the perfect world we imagined in Sam Brown’s Revolution Baby from Sweatdrop. Sweatdrop Studios also offer us some other UK-style Manga with a range of titles, including Looking for the Sun by Morag Lewis, Fantastic Cat by Selina Dean (can’t have a Manga range without cats!) and if you are looking for a taster of this Indy UK manga collective you can check out their collections Stardust and Sugardrops.
Samurai pandas and aircraft flying hounds (dogfighting??? Sorry…) come together in Bulldog Empire from Jason Cobley and Neill Cameron, an alternative world of sentient, talking animals and vegetables. Neill also has his own comic which features ‘the adventures of work-shy, foul-mouthed Binmen of the Future Jobo Hairyfoot and Alf Garibaldi’ in Absolute Dumbass, which picked up a good recommendation from Comics International. We are not repsonsible if Neill’s comics corrupt you.
Flying Monkey Comics brings us the first two volumes of Hope for the Future, which has three very ordinary folks attempting to save the day, which often involves ‘swearing and running away from stuff a lot’. Hope has also been picking up some fine reviews from the comics press, with Redeye, SFX and Comics International among others heaping praise on it. It’s also worth checking out FMC’s website which regularly posts webstrips, which have had me chuckling this week. More studios with a simian-named theme appear in the shape of Monkeys With Machineguns who have two collections to offer right now (with another on the way), In Heaven and Hell and Making Deals With Devils. Am I the only one left with a mental image of chimp gangster Don Uggie Apelino in his head from the name of that studio?
Ellen Linder has Oval Comics on offer, which includes This Year at the Oval, an excerpt of Undertow (which hopefully we’ll see more of) and Somewhere, which is described as ‘Ellen’s treatment of a classic standard as a metaphor for the romantic problems of a synchronized swimmer’. Paul B Rainey has several titles available, including the Book of Lists which collects material from the site of the same name, Swill the Alien (hard-drinking ET!) and the very well received slice-of-life series There’s No Time Like The Present, which not only picked up great reviews from Comics International and Redeye, it received an endorsement from Dave Sim, creator of the acclaimed Cerebus.
Bevis Musson indulges in superhero shenanigans, but his hero, Queen of Diamonds, is the protector of Manchester and just happens to be a raging queen! Brilliant… Meanwhile Edward Norden has a very different take on superheroes with Hieronymous Anonymous; in a world besotted with celebrity superheroes sponsored by big corporations Hieronymous works dead-end jobs to pay his fearsome landlady while he continues anonymously to try and save the day. I’ve got a feeling fans of the Mystery Men will enjoy that.
The artist known as Ventedspleen brings us a wonderfully misanthropic-looking series, which includes Art School Scum (love that cover), Comic Diary, How to Date a Girl in Ten Days and So I Draw (something about that cover reminds me of Brendan McCarthy, which is no bad thing). These have a cool-looking edge to them of the sort I associate with some of the older underground comics and look well worthy of further investigation.
Underfire Comics are a little more unusual; they have comics on offer, as the others do – Youth Gone Wild and Mountain Rex – but they also bring us the 2000AD fanzine Zarjaz, which features all new stories using the cast of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, along with articles and interviews (including interviews with Boo Cook and one of my favourites, Ian ‘Robohunter’ Gibson) and looks to be something Squaxx dek Thargo will want to check out.
I have to say I am learning a lot more about the British comics scene right now; I thought I knew a fair old bit about comics and graphic novels, but I will confess I was largely ignorant of quite a few of these titles (although Mike Carey, it transpires, knew of Bevis’ Queen of Diamonds, so there you go). I’m pretty pleased not only that we’re able to offer these unusual titles to our readers and support the UK comics biz more, but also simply pleased to see how much diversity there is out there. And with most titles being very modestly priced I think they offer a very affordable option for readers to take a chance and explore something different without having to blow large amounts of cash (and you’re helping British talent while you do, so win-win), so please do check them out comics fans. And come back regularly for more as our new British Small Press section grows. You can also explore these comics via the creator’s websites, which you can find on the links section of the blog on your left under British Small Press.
Fri, Jul 7, 2006
Comics and cartoons, Reviews