A little different from Orange Wednesday, Alex Musson over at Mustard Magazine (a very good comedy magazine we’ve featured a few times here), gets in touch with the new Mustard Thursday feature. It’s a shameless attempt to get Mustard seen by a wider audience, but what the hell, it’s a great little magazine…..

The deal is simple, every week, Alex and Mustard will be giving away prizes for people following and retweeting them on Twitter – details at their website.

But whilst you’re at the website, have a quick look around, it really is a great little comedy magazine, and each issue has lots of very familiar, and very funny, names.

You may want to head for Question Tag, where lots of great comedians (and a comic writing wizard) ask each other questions. And whilst on the subject of Alan Moore, he was interviewed exclusively in Mustard #4.

Issue 6 is out right now as well (ooops, actually, it was out in June, and I missed it. Bad me. Bad me) – available to buy for the ridiculously cheap price of £2.50…. here’s a few previews, more at the Mustard website.

TV isn’t doing comedy all that well at the moment (Tramadol Nights anyone? Oh dear). So maybe a quality comedy magazine might be the answer. And as luck would have it, Alex Musson has just released a new issue of his comedy mag Mustard.

Personally I have no idea why Musson’s releasing a new issue in the week where practically no-one orders stuff online, where the post is struggling to cope with the yuletide tidal wave of letters and parcels and where we’re all hunkering down in sub zero temperatures and wondering just how high the snow is going to get and whether we’ll be able to get to the shops for sprouts or not.

But here it is – Mustard issue 5. I haven’t got a copy (yet), but based on past experience, I know Mustard is impressive, well designed, a good read and best of all, especially for a magazine about comedy – it’s funny.

Issue 5 promises interviews with Stuart Lee and Richard Herring, articles from Alan Moore and Matt Berry and 36 pages of funny stuff.

And all for just £2.50 – available from the Mustard Shop.

Alex Musson writes in from Mustard central to let us know a couple of things:

“You can now buy a set of six Mustard movie postcards and also, if you’re an Alan Moore fan you might like the desktop wallpaper sized version of the poster I did for The IT Crowd). In other Mustard news, the third set of Daily Mustard pages come out in Dodgem Logic #3″

Yep, cool postcards, cool Alan Moore desktop and Dodgem Logic #3. More details, and the chance to buy the very good Mustard magazine on Alex Musson’s Mustard website.

(Casablanketyblank and Withnail and I, Robot, two of the Mustard postcards)

Boxing Day, that traditional day of indigestion, too much TV and a dreadful sense of anti-climax. All perfectly summarised by the folks at Mustard Magazine. Back issues available at their website, new material appearing in every issue of Dodgem Logic.

“I first used the name Dodgem Logic on a fanzine that I attempted to do back in 1975, when I was in my early 20s. To be honest it doesn’t really mean anything specific, it’s just suggestive of what we’re going for. On the first issue we’ve used the tagline ‘colliding ideas to see what happens’, which is as much of an agenda as you’re going to get from us. It’s the idea that, if we just connect all these various diverse people and enterprises that we’re in touch with, then there might be something quite lovely and extraordinary come out of the interaction.

We want to provide something that is going to illuminate the rather dismal times that we are currently going through – and which I tend to suspect will be getting a lot worse – as well as giving people some practical information. Whether that’s under the rubric of our recipe pages, DIY clothing pages, articles on squatting or the more political articles. To keep people informed in a way the conventional media doesn’t do anymore.” (link via Jeff Newelt)

Editor / Designer Alex Musson

Self Published.

(Kevin O’Neill’s great Alan Moore illstration against a backdrop of Moore comics)

I Came to this one rather late after reading about the big Alan Moore interview in this issue somewhere online. I’m even later reviewing it. So late in fact that by now it’s well into it’s recession driven hiatus. Which is rather a shame, because based on this issue, it’s actually a funny magazine about comedy.

Obviously the big draw for me is the Alan Moore interview. I’ve said before now that any interview with Moore is worth reading, no matter how many times he’s talking about the same sorts of things, there’s always something interesting in what he has too say. And so it is here. It’s a big interview; 15 pages of dense stuff, but very well designed dense stuff. Lots of information on each page but all laid out in a nice, visually appealling style. Like it says in the lead in… “And boy, can he talk”.

(Another great Alan Moore illo, this time by Dave Sim.)

But once the Moore interview was read and digested I turned my attention to the rest of the magazine. And the actual comedy bits of it are very good indeed.

Think of it perhaps as a more grown up Viz mag. There’s spoof articles such as “Cruel Prank Targets Nation’s Arsewits: Thousands of young men across Britain have been fooled by a new lad’s mag that covertly featured interesting, informative and non-nudity related articles“. Then there’s single panel gag strips, spoof movie news, book reviews and much more.

It’s a real shame that Mustard #4 may well be the last one available for a while, but I’d still recommend heading off to your local Borders to see if they still have the issue. Or alternatively go to the Mustard website to pick up all 4 issues.

A funny magazine about comedy. Indeed it is.

Richard Bruton